Paul was, as always, very eager to impress his prospective parents-in-law. He only wished that Jane would warn him in advance before she whisked him off to visit them. She’d gotten completely the wrong idea about finally giving up touring for good. Now she saw it as her duty to make up for lost time, and not where Paul hoped, but outside, often with her family, doing things. Paul stifled a yawn that almost turned his head inside-out.

So here he was, looking around the garden again from the wooden recliner, much as he’d done the previous Sunday. When would he learn? Inside the house, Jane had probably already promised the next weekend to her parents, so he would have to bag the following one to go and see his father. He checked his arm in the autumn sun to make sure that it wasn’t burnt yet. It felt like he’d been sitting waiting for an hour. He got up, hesitated, and sat back down again. Where was Jane’s father? Although he wasn’t the most garrulous chap, he could sometimes yield a conversation when pressed. Maybe he’d been ensnared and incarcerated in the kitchen and was being held at rolling-pin-point.

Paul shifted uneasily in his seat. He didn’t want to be fussed over and plied with cakes and things. He’d already eaten as much as he could of the Sunday roast and there was no room for dessert. He reached out to the holly bush on his right and pulled off a leaf, bending and folding it to pass the time. He didn’t want to write a song; he’d deliberately left his guitar at home. He’d vowed to leave it alone for at least a month. But his fingers were itching. Stupid holly leaf.

“Are you sure I can’t…”

“No, don’t fuss so. We’ll be out in a minute!”

Paul fancied he heard excited voices on the other side of the dense, tall box hedge, and it made him thankful to be hidden from the street. The screams of the fans still haunted his memory, and he didn’t want his healing to be set back by being mobbed unexpectedly.

“My goodness, you are impatient,” Jane chirped. How she managed to spring across the lawn like that with a stomach full of roast beef Paul had no idea. “You’re supposed to be getting the weight off your feet.”

“Here you are then, Paul, my raspberry iced finger buns,” Jane’s mother crowed, before Paul had the chance to reply. “Eat them while they’re hot, that’s the best time to eat them.”

Paul was now stuck, or if he wasn’t yet he would be soon by the look of the icing. He appealed despairingly with his eyes to Jane’s unfortunate father standing in the doorway, but covered by icing sugar and jam, he was in no mood to fight. “Oh, I don’t want to get all sticky before I drive home,” he mumbled meekly.

“Don’t you worry, I’ve brought tea towels in case you make a mess,” Jane said, signing his death warrant with glee. “Now come on, eat one. Mother usually makes these only once a year, for the Church sale.”

Paul still held back. But, meeting the same hopeful, yet threatening look in both mother and daughter, his resistance snapped and he reached out for a bun. He brought it close in front of his eyes, surveying it suspiciously. Goodness knows what was in it. He was having to make a conscious effort not to grimace.

Then the smell charged into his nostrils, and much of the irrational fear left him. “It smells lovely,” he said, still not daring to taste it. Pen ink smelled nice, but it didn’t guarantee that it wasn’t poisonous.

“Well, are you going to keep us waiting all day?” the pair chorused. Paul couldn’t be sure, perhaps his fevered mind was playing tricks on him, but the smiles were becoming steely and fixed, and the requests were becoming orders. Jane’s father was busy giving Paul a semaphore message from by the conservatory, and Death was pruning the rose bush.

He took a bite. And stopped. Jane tipped her head on one side and glared at Paul with eyes on stalks. Paul cringed and would have carried on, but he’d forgotten how to chew. But he couldn’t spit it out. If only he’d asked for a towel before he’d started. He suddenly realised how he didn’t fit in with the bun-eating classes. Maybe he should have kept touring…

Death was now playing chess with Jane’s father. The rose bush was withering at a rate of knots. Death had a guilty look on his face but he wasn’t admitting to anything. “Paul!” Jane snapped.

“Get on with it!” cried Patsy, the housemaid. Seeing that there was no other option left open to him now, Paul swallowed and braced himself for certain doom. But it was delicious! He began to cram the rest of the bun into his gob ferociously.

“Sorry, my mind was somewhere else,” he burbled, chewing and swallowing and talking and reaching for a second bun all at once.

“In your arse, most likely,” Jane muttered.

The beef was forgotten. Long forgotten. What beef? Paul lived only for bun. As soon as Paul finished his bun, he began making incomprehensible noises at Jane’s mother. Death saw that there would be no business for him there that day and checkmated Jane’s father in two moves before calling his ethereal horse and leaving. When Paul’s mouth was slightly less full, the strange noises could be roughly translated by a trained linguist as, “Can I have another bun, please?”.

And so the obsession began: an obsession that would threaten the lives of all the Beatles, and Paul’s trousers!

“Mr Asher, Mr Asher!” Paul panted, staggering around the corner of the stone vicarage wall. He went to lean on one of the wooden posts between which the welcoming banner was hung, and fell right through it, completely flattening it. He scrambled to his feet, swept the bunting from his shoulders and began to sidle away, about as inconspicuously as a Beatle could in 1967.

“Ah, Paul. What an unexpected surprise. Was that you shouting out my name just now?” Mr Asher replied, unusually without a trace of stiffness and distance. The glasses in either hand gave it away. The staid old priest had been replaced this year by a new trendy vicar, who was into all kinds of new, exotic liquors, and he had very thoughtfully arranged them all on a nice big stand which Mr Asher could hardly fail to have missed.

“Yes, Mr Asher, I…”

“Please, Paul. I’ve told you a thousand times not to be so formal. Don’t call me Mr Asher; call me Sir.”

“Yes, sir. Um, well, I was here to see…”

“Yes, I understand. Jane’s over there helping her mother run the cake stall…” Mr Asher reeled in shock as Paul almost dashed straight through him to sprint over to Jane. “Ooh, young love,” he muttered, as he turned back to the vicar and ordered another pint of the mysterious dark green stuff.

“Hello darling,” Jane cooed, squeezing herself between the cake stand and the patrons of the white elephant stand to the right. “I’m so glad you could come. Love you.” She fluttered forward and gave Paul a peck on the cheek. He hardly seemed to notice it at all. Jane carried on regardless: “I thought that you were going to visit your father this weekend?”

“Oh yeah. I was,” Paul gasped. His gaze darted wildly about and never rested for a second on anything. “But…er…”

“Are you drunk, Paul?”

“No, God no, it’s just…er…how can I put this tactfully?”

“Well, what is it?” Jane asked expectantly.

“Right. The thing is, I really fancy your mother’s buns.”

Jane didn’t hesitate in slapping Paul across the face. The sharp cracking sound brought the whole fete to an abrupt halt. “How dare you say such a thing about my own mother?!” Jane seethed, raising her hand to slap him again.

“Fight, fight, fight!” A chant immediately materialised out of nowhere. It probably centred on the liquor stand…

Paul whipped his head back out of range and wisely kept it there. Jane waved her arm about a bit helplessly, wishing that perhaps she’d chosen Ringo, as he’d be easier to reach over and slap. Then she collapsed inside with crushing disappointment, and she turned for moral support to her mother beside the stand. “Mummy, do something!” she pleaded.

“What, you expect me to reprimand this charming man? I’ll do nothing of the sort.”

“Oh goodness, Jane, I didn’t mean it like that!” Paul chuckled, suddenly catching on and now daring to lean forwards again. “I don’t mean those buns. Although they are very nice, of course.” Mrs Asher blushed gleefully. “I was talking about the raspberry iced buns.” Jane’s face remained stoically suspicious. “I’ve got buningitis or something. I ate them two weeks ago and now I can’t stop thinking about them. I even wrote a song about them!”

Jane’s scowl turned into a cool smirk. “Prove it,” she ordered.

“I haven’t got my guitar; I’ll have to do it a capella,” Paul revealed.

“Well, I believe that this is obvious,” Jane intoned, which can be roughly translated as ‘Duh’.

“Okay, here goes:

“Paul McCartney  //  Eats all the buns at the church where they’re holding the fete.  //  Knocks over the gate.

Goes to Jane’s window.  //  Pleads with her mother to reveal the recipe  //  Or to make more for me.

“Poor old hungry Beatle.  //  Where will you get your buns?  //  I would climb the steeple,  //  If you’d just give me one.”

“No second verse?” Jane demanded, flying in the face of the ecstatic clapping and appreciation for Paul’s crooning.

“No, that’s it,” Paul chattered, hoping that now the bun could begin.

“I preferred it when they had a string quartet playing,” Jane said critically. “It’s hardly a new song, is it?”

“Well, not exactly, no…”

“And the way you kept changing from first to third person quite frankly made me rather giddy.”

“Sorry, Miss Asher,” Paul mumbled. If only he’d been a Cockney urchin, he would have been mournfully rotating his filthy dog-eared cap in his hands by now.

“Oh for Heaven’s sake, Jane, give the man a bun for free,” her mother snorted. “He’s rather gone up in my estimation today.” Paul’s big doleful eyes lit up at this suggestion, and they positively blazed when a precious, precious bun was held up in front of them. Paul stood and watched it, as if hypnotised.

“Well, aren’t you going to eat it?” Jane asked, primly. She was usually happy and outgoing, but when something annoyed her she could affect a bad mood for the rest of the day.

“Oh, but it seems so lovely that for me to touch it would spoil it, and I should so hate to interrupt such perfection.”

“Come on, you’re hardly Anne of Green Gables. Eat the bloody bun and let’s have done with it!” Jane snapped, her red hair shaking and bristling with indignation at being made a spectacle of by her idiotic boyfriend.

And so it began all over again, but now intensifying into a fixation. Paul eventually badgered Jane’s mother into giving him the recipe, and he instantly bought an expensive new baking oven to go with it. From then on in, he wolfed down the buns from dawn until dusk, at least when he wasn’t making more of them. Jane hardly saw him at all over the next few weeks, and it was over a month before any of his band-mates showed any concern.

“All right, McCartney,” Ringo lilted, greeting Paul as he opened the door. Paul’s face was now even rounder and babyish than before, and his chef’s hat was covered in purple icing stains and jam. Ringo stifled a laugh, and reached forward to shake Paul’s hand as he moved over the threshold. He soon found his palm impossible to remove. “Oh Christ, Paul, before you come to answer the door next time, couldn’t you wash the sticky dough crap off your hands?”

“But Ringo, I knead these buns! I really knead to eat more of them!” Paul said, inadvertently showering Ringo with bun crumbs as he neglected to swallow his mouthful of bun first. “Whoops. You’d better clean up.”

“I think I’ll clean meself up when it’s time for me to leave,” Ringo muttered, grimacing as he looked at his hand, extricated at last with great difficulty. “So Jane’s got you slaving away in the kitchen, has she?”

“Oh no, this was my initiative entirely.”

“You know, those are the exact words Mickey the Mauler said when he went soft, an’ all,” Ringo cackled. “Do you remember old Mickey? I think he stopped a fight at our first Cavern gig. Then again, it was him that started it.”

He winced slightly as the intense light of the kitchen banished the homely gloom of the doorstep. Paul sat down at the opposite end of the table, which was piled high with an astonishing disarray of various ingredients. Ringo could barely see Paul over the top of the pile, and began to feel the uneasy nagging that enters your mind in the presence of the terminally insane. Paul began hacking his way into a second giant bun, almost forgetting that Ringo was there at all, even though he’d barely sat down.

Ringo decided to press on. “We thought that it would be good if we started recording again,” he proposed. “John says he’s got some songs he wants to show you, and it would be good if we. . .er. . .are you listening, Paul?”

But Paul was slumped back in his chair, icing smeared all around his frozen lips. It looked like he’d topped himself.

“Rings, smack him about a bit, I can’t wait here all day watching him sleep. I’ve got things to do.”

A hazy image of a ceiling painted grey with peeling paint rippled into view over what seemed like an interminable delay. Around the small room, or perhaps just his limited tunnel of vision, were daubs of pink and black, where faces and hair might have been, and patches of glazed green lurked on his right. The air smelled of disinfectant and stale cardboard. Irritatingly, the indeterminable, muffled, far-away voice that had just spoken sounded vaguely familiar. But far more irritatingly, the unmuffled, contiguous smack around the back of the head that followed felt very familiar indeed.

“Hey John, why do you have to spoil all my fun?” Ringo complained, assuming the most hurt tone he could.

“Well, all right Ringo, you can beat my brains out when I’m next unconscious, all right?”

“What if I can’t wait that long?”

“Then you’ll be the one who ends up in hospital attached to all these tubes and machines and goodness-knows-whats.”

At the thoughtless mention of this, Paul jerked forward to sit bolt upright, and in any other situation he would have done, but he found that he could barely move. Luckily, George was still perceptive enough to register the motion.

“Doctor, doctor…”

“…I must have sat on something sharp. I have a strange hole in my bottom,” John interrupted, giggling.

“Oh, put a sock in it, John,” George snapped. He walked over to the doctor sitting in a chair opposite the end of Paul’s bed, and began to physically shake the dozing medic, who appeared to be in a deeper coma than Paul had been. The doctor hadn’t been that helpful from the start, George thought. He’d been too busy eyeing up his assistant nurses and grooming his thin tawny moustache for when they next returned all the time. And by the time he’d shaken off the layer of grey NHS dust that had settled upon him, Paul was already looking feverishly around the room.

“Ah, Mr McCartney is awake,” noted the doctor, picking up his pen and striding towards the head of the bed. For a short while he fiddled with the drip, just to make it look more complicated than it really was, and then turned his attention to Paul himself. “You’re a very lucky man, Mr McCartney,” he began.

“Please, call me Paul,” Paul croaked feebly.

“Well now, Paul. You had a lucky escape. If your friend Mr Starkey hadn’t broken all the speed limits to get here, you could have died from excess sugar consumption.”

“You can die from that?” Paul asked, with much more vigour. He was horrified. What about his precious buns?

“Yes you can, very quickly, in fact,” the doctor continued. “You go into what we in the medical profession call a glucoma. Your blood sugar levels escalate to the point where your blood begins to crystallise. When we measured your sugar levels after we’d stabilised your heartbeat, they came through at 80%.”

“Woah, you mean that four-fifths of his blood is sugar?” Ringo interjected.

“Oh no, his blood is currently composed entirely of sugar. You as a whole are four-fifths glucose, Mr Paul.”

“I always knew he was a sweetie,” Jane laughed, now bursting into the room and hugging Paul tightly. She really did like to catch him unawares and suddenly smother him. Nobody else had even known that she’d arrived at the hospital.

“Cut the sweet talk, sugar,” Paul gasped, as Jane began to cut off the syrupy circulation to his head. She only tightened her grip. “Ack! Please love, get off.”

“Humph, charming,” Jane snorted. When she went to stand upright again, she suddenly found herself entangled in drip tubes and dialysis equipment, and after flailing about unavailingly for a full minute, she started to throw a tantrum.

The doctor looked on, enthralled, as she struggled angrily, fighting off all offers of help from the Beatles and thoroughly ensnaring herself further. “I say, what a feisty young thing,” he breathed. “Rather! Ding-dong! Bang on!”

A surly matron with an attitude like a Rottweiler thrust her head into the room. “Dr Phillips, haven’t you got your rounds to be completing?” she barked, after she overheard his excited exclamations. “Carry on, Doctor.”

“Oh very well,” Dr Phillips sighed. Jane was such an attractive young thing, but on the other hand, the matron was very scary. He moved reluctantly and lingeringly towards the door as he spoke: “Mr Paul, I understand from your friends’ testimonies that you have something of a bun habit. Buns can be very dangerous things. A bun culture can very quickly get out of hand. But if you take regular exercise from now on, then you can eat a certain number of buns without this situation arising again. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, I hear you. Exercise after every 20 buns,” Paul jabbered, giving Dr Phillips the thumbs-up.

“Well, something like…” Dr Phillips suddenly abandoned the room as a pert young nurse sashayed her way up the corridor past him. “Heeeeelloooooo!” he purred, abruptly letting go of the door and swooping on the girl.

Over the next week, Paul sweated and had dizzy spells and really suffered as he went cold pastry. But he soon met up with someone in comparable agony: a rugby flanker who’d broken his leg in fifteen different places was recovering in the next room, and they began to chat to pass the time between visitors.

 “Why didn’t your leg ever break before?” Paul once asked, intrigued. “Was it really brittle in fourteen places already?”

“You really don’t play rugby that often, do you son?” the flanker replied. Paul shook his head. “Well, there are fifteen players on a rugby union team,” the flanker explained. “I tell you, if you get it broken in one place, you’ll be bloody lucky to escape the other fourteen times. And sometimes the referee gives you an extra one for luck.”

“Sounds pretty violent,” Paul chuckled, shaking his head in slight disbelief. “But I’ve been in a few intense jiffies of my own, you know.”

“Not enough for you to have stopped using the word jiffy,” the flanker said. Paul laughed, long and hard, as he tried to think of something else to say. He’d already asked the poor man for buns three times, and pressed him for jam twice. “You know, with your physique, you’d make a good prop,” the flanker remarked. “Our team’s been a bit short on forwards lately, especially since I got injured.”

“Me be a prop?” Paul hooted. He thought of how his belly button had suddenly taken on the ability to stand cups in; how when he smiled he could now see his cheeks; what he now couldn’t see any more; how his chin had suddenly decided to start a family; how when he slid down into the bath, his rolls of fat would keep riding up his back. “I could never be a prop,” he declared. “I’m just a fat, lazy bastard, and I’ve never handled a rugby ball in my life!”

“When can you start playing for us then?” the flanker grinned, reaching out his hand.

Paul champed on the gum-shield, and immediately felt two uncomfortable sensations. One was a slight compulsion to gag, and the second was the slight wobbling of his cheeks as they jiggled into place. The hooker to his right in the scrum kept looking at him piercingly, as if he’d uncovered a plot that involved Paul running off with all the half-time oranges. Paul understood and tried not to notice the scrutiny. He’d hardly recognised himself when the nurses had shown him his 21-stone reflection at the hospital. He was still very handsome, in a chubby sort of way, but the whole shape of his face had changed. Little children laughed at him behind his back, where once they would have goggled in awe. But that was perfect. He’d be able to sneak into and escape away from the ground unnoticed, with no cavalcade of dummy limousines or flamethrowers. Those had been John’s idea. Brian needed to learn to take him less seriously.

“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” the hooker quizzed him as they jogged round the 22 to finish the warm-up.

“Er, I used to play for Redhill,” Paul replied, making a mental note not to get it confused with Reading should anyone else ask him. “I think I’ve played this team once before.” He flashed the man a trademark adorable, twinkling smile, hoping that perhaps he would let him get on with being unrecognised.

“Well, I wasn’t in it,” the man replied, folding his arms.

Paul wondered why some stupid gets tended to treat him like the Gestapo treated a prisoner of war whenever they couldn’t immediately identify him. “Oh, but I played for Reading for years before coming here; we played everyone.”

“I thought you said you played for Redhill?” the man carried on, perseveringly.

Tosser.

“Well, it used to be Reading, and then…they built a hill there after a while.” Paul’s cerebral cortex looked askance in embarrassment and apologised to the rest of his brain.

“Well, I never played Reading or Redhill. This is my first game.”

Paul felt like saying, ‘Good luck’, but his awkward bastard of an interlocutor probably didn’t have The Great Escape running irksomely through his mind. And he wouldn’t get re-captured by the Nazis, more was the pity.  “You mean you’ve never played rugby before?”

“No, I haven’t. Not a minute of it.”

Tosser, tosser, tosser.

“But I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere else,” the man persisted, brazenly looking Paul’s corpulent bulk up and down for further clues. Paul tried not to squirm. If one part of him squirmed, that set another bit of him off these days. The chain reaction sometimes wouldn’t stop until the sugar in him had solidified.

“I could have been your neighbour. I move around a lot.”

“Doesn’t look like it from this angle,” the man sneered. “And I only moved here from Australia last week,” he revealed with conviction.

“Oh, will you piss off?!”

The man jumped back as Paul raised his voice. “Your voice is bloody familiar as well. Sounds like what someone shouted when I stormed the stage at some concert back Down Under. You ever been to…”

The referee blew his whistle at last and the captains converged in the middle of the pitch. Paul wheeled away from his interrogator with relief and glee, since now his next bun-feast was only just over 80 minutes away. And all this exercise would set him up nicely for at least the next week.

“Feeling good, son?” the flanker from the hospital asked, patting Paul on the shoulder. He took his hand away again when the fold of flab it was resting on began to slip. Paul giggled charmingly as it did so and turned round as the flanker took up position behind him and to his right.

“Yeah, I’m really looking forward to this,” he confided, as the game kicked-off and the ball hit him in the back of the head. “Er, mine!”

A scrum was selected by the opposing team and their front row scanned Paul just as his hooker had done. He tried to get on with the game and remember the important half of the rules. The ball sailed out to the winger and Paul watched it go from the melee of the broken scrum, before realising that actually the winger was the smallest guy on the pitch and couldn’t score unless he had a lot of space to run at. He hauled himself to his feet and made for the ruck that was forming. Someone decided to tackle him illegally just before he got to it, but he barely noticed. He got hold of two of his team-mates’ jerseys with his hands and drove them forward, through four enemy blue jerseys and well past the ball.

He picked it up himself, beginning quite to enjoy this unforeseen bonus of being immensely heavy, and the adrenaline pumped its way through his veins, loosening great glacial crags of sugar as it went. Three opponents he handed off with the sheer force of his unstoppable momentum and now the try line was in sight. The back-line now arranged itself in front of him, ready to fell him at any cost. The scrum-half ducked and braced for impact, but completely missed as Paul somehow darted nimbly to the right in an instant, breaking all the laws of physics without somehow breaking his ankle. A spry sidestep to the left disposed of the first centre, an agile scamper again to the left left the second for dead. “How the hell?” each one wondered as he disappeared past them. Most amazingly of all, a fleet-footed sprint saw him over the try-line before anyone else could intercept him.

Camberley Mechanics stood open-mouthed in despondent, awe-struck amazement, as if they’d just heard Yesterday for the first time. The spectators at the side of the pitch didn’t know whether to cheer or even applaud. One sat apart though, left well alone by dint of her sheer unaffability, and glared at Paul with unalloyed hatred. She knew exactly whose face was hidden beneath the recent extra padding. She’d kissed it many times, years before, and since he’d gone to Germany, she’d vowed that she’d never forget it, though she moved away from Liverpool just so she’d never see him again. First seeing Paul conquer the world as a Beatle, and secondly seeing him come to play against her own favourite rugby team and blow them out of the water was almost enough to drive her insane, but she held her expression steady and seethed in foreboding, ruminative silence.

…“It’s murder, I can’t do it, I can’t keep it up,” Paul gasped towards the captain as he padded back after his fourth try. He was dripping with sweat and he’d doubtless smink when he got home.

“All right, you’ve done enough,” the captain replied. “We’ll sub you off if you want.”

Paul nodded, and made his way carefully to the touchline with the smaller crowd, before packing his boots into a bag he’d brought along. Alice M. Alice (her mother had been fond of palindromes but had been a couple of clues short of a crossword), watching him intently from the other side, realised what was going on, and figured out exactly what Paul wouldn’t want.

“Oh my God!” she bellowed, and then screamed. Paul instinctively hunkered down, tensing himself, getting ready to run. “IT’S PAUL MCCARTNEY!” Everybody looked, but nobody figured out who it could be. “THE FAT ONE, OVER THERE!” With a positive lock on their target, the crowd bustled over toward the gate at the edge of the park and clustered excitedly in Paul’s way, but a nimble dart past one, a spry sidestep past another, and lots of agile scampering got him past them, exactly as it had got him past many rabid audiences before. Alice made to grab his bag from him, but he was too quick for even her determined lunge, and he charged through the gate ahead of the crowd, which presently got itself stuck in the narrow gap as it clamoured for its idol.

Alice backed away and let out a pained yell, which went almost unnoticed amidst all the commotion. “Something up, love?” Her current boyfriend, Dwayne, hovered beside her uncertainly. She stalked away, boiling with anger. It hadn’t been so bad all this time. But to go from Paul to Dwayne, all because he had a career to think of…no, it had been so bad all this time. The bastard needed to pay. And in a currency more valuable than all the heartache she’d suffered. Pad, pad, pad. Cough. The knuckles of her clenched fists grew white. “Er, Alice…?”

“GO AWAY, DWAYNE!”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

Paul swiftly flicked the switch with one hand as he pulled down the hatch with the other. A surge of sweltering, bread-flavoured air caught him full in the face, and he breathed it in deeply, savouring its aroma, its piquant pastry perfume, which in actual fact was so overpowering that it would have knocked any normal man out. But Paul’s tolerance levels had kept rising and rising, until he could stick his head right into the oven as they were baking and keep inhaling its beautiful bouquet, at least until his eyebrows began to singe from the heat. Goodness knows what colour his liver was by now.

“Aaaah,” he breathed, long and slowly. “My work here is bun.” He whipped the baking tray out onto the side and stirred the icing mixture one last time. “Eat them while they’re hot, that’s the best time to eat them,” he grinned to himself. “Definitely the best time, mmm, definitely the best time, oh yes!”

A knock at the door spoilt his unnerving ecstasy. Jane was standing outside, and Paul could see through the glass roundel that she had a face like thunder. He felt awfully as if he’d just drifted into the Bermuda Triangle. He could find no way back now, and didn’t hold out much hope of survival. “Jane, hello,” he twittered pleasantly, ladling on as much blandishment as it had taken to get her to kiss him on their first date.

“Don’t try to use your syrup on me,” Jane fumed, barging into the house and slamming the door shut so that the neighbours wouldn’t overhear. Paul’s face fell. “You’re all over the papers!”

“Is this another joke about my weight?” Paul asked suspiciously.

“No it bloody well is not! You know what you did, you, you, fat fool!” Paul looked blankly at the tabloid in her hand. “You only went and ate the Easter Bunny!”

“Hey, now wait! It was an easy mistake to make!” Jane put her hands on her hips, and as she did so, half of the inner pages of the newspaper flapped and chattered their way to the floor. She didn’t look down for an instant; her scowl hardened, to the point where she was either about to burst into furious tears or plunge the planet into nuclear winter. Paul took a step back so that he could take a dominant step forward without coming too close. “For God’s sake, the guy was bright pink and his surname was Bunny! What was I supposed to think?”

“You were supposed to think ANYTHING! Because the first thought would have told you that the Easter Bunny was a rabbit and that rabbits aren’t made out of raspberries and bread!”

“He didn’t taste like a normal rabbit anyway, he tasted of chocolate!”

“That’s not the point!” Jane bawled, hurling the rest of the sorry paper to the carpet and moving forward, finger accusingly pointing at Paul’s third chin. “That’s not the Hoola-Bandoola-ing point! Look at you! You’re a wreck! You’re not the man I fell in love with at all! You just wobble around to the shops and back, buying out all their baking soda, flour and sugar! You never come and see me or my parents anymore! I keep having to explain to them that you’re really busy when in fact, no, you’re just pigging yourself senseless in this crumby little house of yours! I can’t tell them that you don’t want to see them because I know that at the same time you can’t be bothered to come and see me!” Her tone softened, but only because her throat had nearly torn itself to shreds. “Paul, I can’t go on like this. You have to change back, or I’m not going to find anything about you to love anymore. I said I’d love you forever, but that was the old you. Now you only tell me lies so that you can get at those accursed buns my mother told you how to make. And I…I…”

She tried desperately to carry on, but her face crumpled in defeat and she began to sob inconsolably. Paul slowly wobbled his way towards her, and placed a pudgy hand on her shoulder. How slim it felt to him now. “Jane,” he whispered gently. “It’s not true. I love you more than anything else. I stopped touring for you. I bought a house here to be near you. I love you more than John, George and Ringo; more than me own Dad even. More than the bu…oh God, the icing will be going hard!”

Jane caught up with him in the kitchen as he squeezed the red ooze onto the fifth bun. “Oh, er, sorry,” he said, hardly even looking up. “Look, if you’d been the one going hard, I promise I’d have run to you inst…”

She slapped him across the face as hard as she possibly could. So hard that she almost gave her hand whiplash. He stopped right then, frozen, as if the universe had suddenly disappeared from around him. He had to force himself to look up into Jane’s face. And by then she had turned around and was heading quickly for the door, head held high, steps short and rapid. Another five seconds and she was gone. Paul remained standing motionless, replaying the image of her striding to the door in his head, with desperate sadness, fondness and longing. She’d been his girlfriend for three years now. She’d been his truest foundation outside of the band, and not just in the public eye, but in private as well. They’d told each other everything. They’d given each other everything. They were destined to be together, and he’d thrown her away for the sake of some pastry and raspberry icing.

Perfect pastry.

He looked down at the tray in front of him, and raised his hand, to dash it aside.

Ravishing raspberry.

He had nothing left now but his buns; he couldn’t lose them as well.

Impeccable icing.

At least he could rely on them not to turn against him. How could she be his soul-mate if she didn’t love the buns as well? She’d grown up on them. She’d obviously become tired of them, the ingrate. He wouldn’t tire of them. He’d never leave them. He lowered his hand. A glazed look came over his eyes. “Oh well,” he said. “All the more for me then.”

Alice had considered sparring verbally with the telephone operator to wangle a way of obtaining Paul’s telephone number and thus tracing him, but in the end, it hadn’t been hard to narrow the focus of her search. The corner shop with the large sign in the window announcing, ‘Buy nine sacks of flour, get the tenth half price’, the small, shamefaced scraps of flour left on the floor where the sacks had been, and where the builders were fitting new double-doors gave her a clue. The tell-tale trail leading away from the shop gave her all she needed.

Burt Lancaster was an ordinary man with an unfortunate name. His friends didn’t like it that much themselves, to be honest. If he’d been called Kurt Lancaster, or even Burt Doncaster, then they could have made plays on it and given him a suitable lifelong nickname. As it was, his nickname was his ordinary name, and all anyone could do was ask if he’d starred in any big films lately, or seen the one where he’d played so-and-so, which he hadn’t. He made a point of never seeing Burt Lancaster films.

“Time for an early lunch, don’t you think, Burt?” Charlie called, throwing his shovel aside and making a beeline for the nearest greasy spoon. He winked as he said it. Burt presumed that his name had been meant in the film-star sense, although coming from Charlie, it most likely didn’t have any sense behind it. He drove the little roller up and down the new stretch of pavement one more time, trying to get the squashy tarmac even with the untouched segments around it. He sometimes walked this road, so extra care was needed.

He wiped the dust from his merciless forest of scratches which amounted to his road-worker’s goggles, and blinked. The Abominable Snowman appeared to be moving house. Except his house had wheels. When he removed his goggles, he realised that it was actually a ludicrously fat man, grunting and groaning, pushing at a dreadfully slow rate, in a four-wheeled wagon, a stack of sacks of flour which did indeed tower as high as the average Himalayan mountain. He considered staying and protecting his pavement until the precarious peril had peacefully passed, but he was paid by the hour. And his wife was planning leek and onion soup for dinner that night, which he could do with being too late for. He followed Charlie into the greasy spoon and abandoned his work to the peril.

When he returned, it wasn’t exactly as he’d expected. Instead of there being a sack of flour embedded in the tarmac, an imbecilic track of footprints marked where the overweight wretch had passed. And he hadn’t even got to the end of the road, Burt noticed.

“Hey, you! Fatty! Why don’t you watch where you put your bloody feet?” he yelled after him.

Paul turned round, slowly and purposefully. “If you’d just look yourself, you’d see I haven’t touched what you were doing,” he complained. He swivelled back around and returned to pushing, extending the trail of footprints further…

It was the point in a relationship when the man’s friends get to realise the truths about the woman which the man had been screening until that point for the sake of the woman’s honour, and when the woman’s friends were telling her exactly why she didn’t need the man because of all the faults they already knew he possessed.

“Moody cow,” Paul was sulking. “She came round and expected me to get up and come round her bloody boring house and listen to her parents talking about drapes. Now where’s the bun in that?”

“It’s when she draped herself all over you that I felt sick,” John snidely replied.

Paul ignored him completely. For the first time in around four months, all four of the Beatles had gathered together in the same place. Owing to constraints of mobility, they’d convened at Paul’s house, and were sitting around his sitting-room. Paul’s voluminous vastness was consuming most of the sofa, John had knelt down behind it and was peeping over the top rather like Chad, and George and Ringo were positioned to Paul’s left and right on chairs by the window.

“And she’d take baths every day, but you know, she’d still end up smelling.”

“That was probably from hanging around you too much. Notice how she always smelled worse at the end of the day.”

“You ever considered being a marriage counsellor, John?” Paul rasped acerbically, putting his hands on where he assumed his hips had once been.

John winced at the barb, but felt that he’d still have the advantage if he pressed on. “Well, you’d be a fat lot of good if you were one.”

“Oh, really?” Paul beamed. “Well, thanks, man.”

John rolled his eyes. It was like beating a gorilla at chess. Or Stevie Wonder at I-Spy. He glowered at Paul, with little effect. “And why are you holding on to your balls?”

“Is that what they are? I can’t see.”

“You know, if that had been any normal conversation, it would have been one of us saying that as a joke,” commented Ringo, slightly sadly.

“It’s true, this joke has gone fat enough, Paul,” John sternly recapitulated. “Just because we’ve finished touring, it doesn’t mean that we can let our lives go to pot.” George coughed softly through the hazy grey smoke that cloaked him like a shroud, and John instinctively reached out for the joint. “Well, OK. If we let it go to pot, it has to be the same type of pot, or we’re going to get nowhere. There’s nobody down the studio anymore since you stopped nagging us all about it. George Martin rang me up the other day; he said he’s almost beginning to miss us.”

Paul appeared to look into the distance uncertainly. Almost unconsciously as he did so, he brought his bun-filled hand to his mouth and took a thoughtful bite. A long pause followed. He took a look at the bun he was holding, sighed, and said, “I miss Jane.”

The other three groaned. “Ye daft get, ye can’t miss that stinky, moody bloody bird,” John joked, trying to sound jolly as well as biting, and punching Paul lightly in the arm.

Paul’s voice quavered a little. “Well, I do. And all I’ve got are these buns. I don’t want to go back in the studio just yet. I don’t even remember the last time I played my guitar.”

“It’s not covered in crumbs and shit, so it can’t have been for a month, at least,” Ringo reported.

“See, I can’t keep anything on my mind but Jane. I look at that guitar and I think of all the songs I wrote with her in me ‘ead. I know I need something else to occupy myself, but all I want are these buns.” He smiled a sickly grin.

“Look to the east, man,” George burbled through the bent joint.

“East, man? What for? I’ve got enough girls here screaming at me to get my pants off.”

“It’s just a shame that you can’t see them to get them off,” Ringo quipped. “I bet you don’t even know if you’ve got any on.”

“I can tell you,” confidently said a girl, quite tall, with regimentally straight, flaxen hair marching down to her shoulders, who had materialised in the sitting-room doorway without a sound. The Beatles looked at her with a start of surprise, which was dwarfed by the surprise they experienced when they realised that she wasn’t about to scream. Her expression was eerily serene, as a matter of fact. Serene to the point of being disconcerting.

And then suddenly, it was Paul who screamed.

“Yes, it’s me. I thought you’d recognise me.” Alice sneered, with as much steely contempt as she could summon up.

“Eh? No, I’ve left some buns in the oven! They’ll be nearly burnt!” He hauled his gigantic, sprawling mass up from the sofa and, turning his back on Alice, made his way to the kitchen at a considerable rate of knots. How he managed to spring across the room like that, Ringo had no idea. Alice, finding herself thus affronted by Paul’s departing rear, became twice as eerily serene as she had been before. If he couldn’t identify her, the job was made that much easier.

“Pull up a chair, love,” George coughed through the haze, hiding his suspicions for the moment. “You on your own?”

“Well, I was for a few years, but the less said about that the better,” Alice answered, shooting a quick glance at the kitchen. She hadn’t expected to find all the Beatles here, so for the moment she would calmly act like a mildly obsessive fan, until they left or she could find a way of getting Paul alone or something.

“Then she met me,” announced Dwayne, bursting through the door in what he hoped was akin to a triumphant fanfare. He thought to himself. “No wait, the door should have been shut. Should I do it again?”

“He’s got ambition, but he’s simply too gormless,” Alice suggested loudly, without a hint of contrition. Dwayne, who had backed out of the room in preparation for a second pass, stayed where he was in the vestibule, rather sadly, feeling alternately ashamed of his own shortcomings and desperate.

“Who was that?” Ringo asked, with more than a hint of concern.

“Just my chaperone,” Alice said emotionlessly. “I don’t want Paul reacting badly to my coming here.”

“Hmm. So what exactly are you doing here, girly? We’re not going to be your new boyfriends, and we’re hardly in a state to put on a concert for you,” John told her, still kneeling behind the sofa. She was looking past him toward the kitchen and he got a good view of the side of her face without her noticing. She was undoubtedly pretty, in a cool sort of way, but she worried him more than slightly. It was something that he could very well have put his finger on, but he didn’t want to entertain that possibility just yet.

“Oh, I don’t want any of you as boyfriends; I know how it would be,” she asserted idly. “At one stage or another, you’d become too busy and then you’d make some excuse to leave me behind. So I’ve heard.”

John raised an eyebrow. Had she been sent by Cynthia or something?

“Besides, it’s not that I want one more ex to be worrying about.” Her expression remained set in stone, but it was Paul who was petrified when he returned to the room, holding several buns in one sticky paw that had extra icing smeared over them to cover up the burnt spots.

“Maud! I thought I’d recognised you from somewhere.”

If she hadn’t known him better or hadn’t had such a low opinion of men in general, Alice would almost have suspected Paul of playing mind games to unsettle her. “Guess again,” she snapped, primly, fixing her gaze on the gap between the curtains opposite and not moving it once until she next got up.

“Daisy? Buttercup?”

“I’m not a sodding flower, John. Oh sorry, you’re Paul, aren’t you?”

“You know her from before, Paul?” Ringo quizzed. He sat up a little straighter in his chair as the puzzle began to piece itself together. Alice’s lips shrank as the seams began to ship water. She hadn’t exactly thought of how she’d cope with being recognised with these three in attendance. But there was always Dwayne lumbering in reserve.

“Gemma? Frida? Helga? Shona? Sally? Lucy?”

“Peppermint Patty?” piped up the Off-His-Headed Kid through the mist.

Paul ignored George and worked on rattling through the names quicker and quicker, since he guiltily understood that the visiting stranger wouldn’t be appreciating his wrong guesses, and also that this could take all day if he wasn’t careful. “Liz? Miss Lizzie? Elizabeth? Liza? Elise? Betty? Bet? Beth? Bethan? Bethanie?”

“What sort of fetish did you have for people named after the Queen, McCartney?” Lennon interrupted.

“Don’t start. I’m actually only sticking to the blondes.” John looked impressed. The mystery visitor however, very much didn’t. Paul continued: “Stephanie? Martha? Mary? Julia? Maggie Mae? Rita? Sadie? Zadie? Elsa? Rebecca?”

“Not Rebecca Martin?”

“Not you as well?! I knew she’d had George, but not you.”

“She said I was the biggest of all us lot,” Ringo beamed, with a little wink.

“You probably had to cheat and use your drumstick,” George scoffed, utterly deadpan. Even Ringo burst out laughing. After a short while, they stopped chuckling, and all three instinctively turned to reminiscing. To break the silence, two coughs came from the vicinity of the sofa.

“Oh, I’m sorry, were you coughing?” John conceded politely.

“No, no, I insist. You go first,” Alice assured him. She wanted her rage to boil over in the intervening time.

“I had her twice, before and after you lot,” John told the group. “I was the only one she came back to; I’d just like you to know that.”

“We wouldn’t touch her once we knew where she’d been,” George interposed once more. “I noticed her language was getting worse and worse, and there could only be one reason for that.” John waved him away with a scornful sound.

“Besides, I didn’t want to lead her on and disappoint her. I’ve always had great respect for women,” Paul extemporised, the falseness of his angelic statement only concealed by the difficulty of recognising which was his truthful expression any more. Alice coughed once more, nevertheless. “So where were we?”

“Rebecca Martin,” Alice reminded him, with acutely measured composure.

“Right.” Paul at least had the decency to look sheepish at this point. “Vivian? Kim? Britt? Prudence? Vicky? Alice?”

“Now the only question is which Alice.” Alice affected that she was inspecting her nails carelessly, but in reality, with each name Paul recounted, she was indeed growing angrier and angrier. The curtains flapped about the window as the breeze grew cooler. Something in the air both inside and outside had changed. Paul’s memory dusted itself off.

“Not…” Paul gasped. “I’m sorry…” Paul spluttered. “But I thought that you’d understand…” Paul croaked, enfeebled by guilt.

“I did understand,” Alice said by way of rejoinder. “Given the information you told me at the time, I understood perfectly. You told me that you were going to the corner shop to buy fish-sticks for our tea. I understand that to go and buy fish-sticks, you have to leave the house and walk to the corner shop. I watched you leave from the doorway. You paused and waved to me from the corner, and I thought it was sweet of you. I waited in that doorway for twenty minutes, and then I ran to the shop to find out what was keeping you. The next time I see you, you’re a picture in the paper. I tore you up like you’d torn me, and threw you away, but your picture wouldn’t stay out of my face. All my friends were suddenly obsessed with you. Your pictures were on every wall, your interviews on both television channels. Everywhere I went, people were humming your tunes. Asking me whether I’d really been your lover once. And what’s more, I never did have my f***ing tea!”

Her tone never wavered or strained. Her face never betrayed any emotion. Either she’d learned to live with it and was taking it remarkably well, or Paul was in some serious shit, his band-mates privately thought. The way she held her stare, so unforthcoming and so steady, worried them further. But they couldn’t leave now, and they couldn’t say anything. The next person to speak had to be Paul. It wasn’t often that you got to hear a dead man speak his own eulogy.

Things suddenly began to happen very quickly after a slow spell. Paul, feeling more anxious than he’d expected when confronted with another of his liaisons of old, made his case, describing, quite truthfully, how George had met him as he approached the shop and told him to come at once to meet John. John had all but decided that they’d be going to Germany later that afternoon, and there was no time to lose. All he could do was return home, fill in his dad and race for the airport. He’d considered writing letters in Germany, but hadn’t known how Alice would react. Eventually, he said, he came to the conclusion that it’d just be better if he let sleeping dogs lie, though he didn’t use that exact phrase, and he’d hoped that Alice could move on. He’d given hints in some of his interviews that there were people he missed back home who he wished he hadn’t left behind, but hadn’t named her because he knew that that would have caused more problems than it solved. Alice finally turned her head, got up and told him that she wasn’t a mind-reader. Then with the subtlest hint of resignation, she’d told Paul that they’d talk about it later, and suggested going into the kitchen.

Once there, Paul had been completely diverted by his bun obsession, and had insisted on giving everyone a proper tour of the kitchen, since everyone was there. He’d opened the vast door of his industrial oven, and overpowered his audience with an explosion of doughdour, including Alice. Dwayne had burst in, swiftly knocked Paul out, stacked each unconscious Beatle onto a shelf of the huge oven, even heaving Paul’s hefty leaden self onto the bottom shelf, barred them in with the latch, and magnanimously set about reviving Alice, who looked at him dazedly for a second. Dwayne smiled, and opened his mouth to say something soothing, but he never got the chance. Alice leapt to her feet.

“Dwayne, this is easily the stupidest thing you’ve ever done! How do you think I’m going to get away with killing all of the Beatles?!” she raged, secretly because he’d actually accomplished something positive for once. And in that she included adding two and two together to make four.

“But, you were going to kill one of them…”

“That’s not the point! They could cover it up if one of them died! They would have had to! But now you’ve screwed everything up!”

“Well, I can take them out again…”

“NO! Just because you’re an idiot doesn’t mean that I’m not going to kill them! Get outside and make sure that nobody comes to disturb me!”

Dwayne shuffled off, his mind ablaze. Alice ignored him as soon as he left her line of vision, and knocked on the plastic door in front of Paul’s face. He dully came to, looked about himself, and found himself staring straight into Alice’s eyes through the screen.

“Alice! W-w-what are you doing?”

“I’m making you dinner, darling,” she replied.

“How lovely.” He pushed at the door, and found that it wouldn’t budge. It didn’t even creak. It looked and sounded pretty impenetrable. “Look Alice, I know what I did was foolish…”

“I’ll say,” Alice growled, her voice cracking for the first time, in a dreadful way.

Paul had expected some sort of retort. He was a little surprised when he found himself expected to carry on with no prompting. “But, but I’m not how I used to be. I don’t…” Jane. His mind clouded over at the thought of how he’d treated her, and he was suddenly consumed with regret a thousand times sharper and more painful than that he’d actually felt when she’d left him that day. Alice pounced, in no mood for waiting.

“Let’s face it, Paul. You’re still the same fool you always were. The world’s better off without you.”

“Alice, wait! Why are you doing this? I-I don’t know what’s going on!”

“But you were never one of the cognoscenti, were you? Hardly one of the illuminati, the intelligentsia, the literati.”

“What have Italians got to do with it?!” Paul cried, *pounding* on the inside of the oven with bewildered frustration.

“Agh, if you weren’t so repulsively stupid I’d almost think I was being harsh.” She backed away and stood up.

“No, wait! We can work it out, Alice. Just think of what I’m saying!”

“Say goodnight, Paul,” Alice smirked.

“Honey, don’t!” Paul shouted desperately, but she closed the iron safety hatch on his pleas and hid him finally from sight. She smiled, and allowed herself a small, gleeful gesture of victory, since she couldn’t be seen any longer. Her weary eyes seemed to lighten and glow in the dim light of the kitchen. Her irises sparkled at the muffled thuds from inside. Her fingers played lightly along the shaft of the lever. Her hand grasped the ribbed grip, and she cackled implacably for the bitter glory of her long-anticipated revenge.

There was a knock at the front door.

Alice thought quickly to herself. Would Dwayne really be so stupid as to lock himself out somehow? No, this had to be someone else, she reasoned. Double the number of pounding sounds were emanating from inside the oven, but she was certain that even should all four of them push together, they wouldn’t be able to break through inches of solid iron.

Silently so as not to alert her captives, she tiptoed her way into the living-room, and peeked around the edge of the curtains at the front door. There was a large contingent of women standing impatiently outside the door. They looked like fans. Her thoughts swirled. Perhaps someone had recognised him after the, ‘From Fab Four To Flab Four’ article in the newspaper and trailed him home. But it was unlikely. But what other explanation was there?

The knocking grew more frequent. It also became more aggressive, maybe even bad-tempered. Why hadn’t Dwayne told her that these people were approaching? The oversized runt had probably gotten sulky and gone home, damn him.

Inside the oven, even though the heat hadn’t yet been turned on, the Beatles were running out of time, and air.

“Bad trip, bad trip!” George was screaming, lashing out at his claustrophobic iron prison.

“Stop it, it was pot!” Ringo shouted down at him. The oven now stank of some evil fashion of marijuana cake. “We’re actually in an oven!”

“Oh, well that’s all right then,” George said, quickly acquiescing and calming down to enjoy his highness.

“It is not!” Paul argued. “John, you’re nearest where the handle would be. Can’t you push it open?”

John could be heard panting and groaning above Paul. And yet this isn’t slash. He set his feet hard and as square as he could against the curved back of the oven, and pushed forward with his arms, legs and back. Ringo and Paul tried to help him, but Ringo wasn’t tall enough to exert much force on the door, and Paul’s globular frame was too unwieldy to bring much to bear. Eventually John gave up. “I want to (it’s so heavy),” he gasped, after straining several tendons in his effort. “Ooh, my arms!”

“Then it won’t be long,” Paul sighed, punching the impassable iron half-heartedly. “I guess we’d better save our air and hope she changes her mind.”

“I feel fine, because I’ve got a feeling some other guy will do something,” Ringo mumbled sleepily, as he began to be overcome by the concentrating carbon dioxide. “Hmm, I’m so tired.”

“Get back, Rich. Help ain’t coming from nowhere, man,” John grumbled, burying his head in his hands. “She’s going to set fire to us lot and no mistake. Paul, I would shout at you, but I figure I can do plenty of that when we’re both dead.”

“I guess this is the end then,” Paul muttered. “The love you take is equal to the love you bake…”

…Alice stealthily crept over to behind the door, keeping out of sight of the roundel to avoid detection. There was a hushed muttering coming from outside, not exactly the frenzied hubbub she’d expected. But still, they looked very intent on not going anywhere except into the house. The letterbox flipped open. She pressed herself back closer against the wall and wondered how on earth she could explain this to a hundred rabid fans and get out alive. A hand now reached through the letterbox and started working its way towards the handle.

Alice confronted it. She slapped it and shouted at it, “Excuse me, what do you think you’re doing?”

“Oh, so you’re his latest bitch, are you?” said whoever the hand was connected to.

This she hadn’t expected. “I…beg your pardon?”

“We happen to know for certain that this is Paul McCartney’s house,” continued the voice. “You wouldn’t believe how hard we had to try to trick the telephone operator, but we did it, so let us in. We’ve got things to discuss with him.”

Alice ignored the shouts of rising agitation as she hurried back over to the curtains in the living room to get a better look at the crowd. Now many of them were looking directly at her in return, and she saw various degrees of anger, malice and bitterness on the faces of just about all of them. Some looked a bit like the Queen from a certain angle. This explained exactly why Dwayne had been disposed of without trace. Alice smiled and returned to the vestibule.

…“Lads, nothing’s happening,” Ringo disclosed. “I think she’s just gone. Perhaps we should push again.”

The crowd of women marvelled and clapped at the creaking and straining and muffled yelps of despair that came from inside the heaving oven. “And all you have to do is pull this lever here, and we can listen to them cooking,” Alice announced proudly.

“I want to pull it!” clamoured Maud, Daisy, Buttercup, Gemma, Frida, Helga, Shona, Sally, Lucy, Liz, Miss Lizzie, Elizabeth, Liza, Elise, Betty, Bet, Beth, Bethan, Bethanie, Stephanie, Martha, Mary, Julia, Maggie Mae, Maggie, Mae, Rita, Sadie, Zadie, Elsa, Vivian, Kim, Britt, Prudence and Vicky at once. “I’ve always wanted to put McCartney in a big fucking oven,” Kim added. Only Rebecca seemed to be having second thoughts, since Ringo was in there too.

But the tidal wave of grasping hands bustled and fought their way over towards the lever, which stuck invitingly out and forward from the top of the oven’s left-hand-side. The Beatles’ hearts leapt one last time when they figured out there was a crowd outside, but they quickly apprehended their true intentions. Paul began to wish they’d hurry up with it.

And they did. They smiled evilly. Their weary eyes lightened and glowed in the kitchen’s gloom. In a great trembling ball of palms and digits, their fingers grasped the ribbed grip, and as one, they cackled implacably for the bitter glory of their long-anticipated revenge.

There was a knock at the door. “I’ll get that,” Alice volunteered. “It’s probably my idiot boyfriend come back.”

It was. “Alice, I’ve had enough,” he stuttered as defiantly as he could. He looked to his left for similar stuttering support that scarcely dared to draw on its own power for self-belief. “You’re not going to go through with this.”

“Oh, I’m not, am I?” Alice exclaimed, clapping a hand derisorily to her cheek. “Oh, God forbid that Dwayne and his incredible intellect should stand in my path! The sheer force of his personality alone is sufficient to strike terror into my bones! Dwayne, listen, if you can understand this. You’re an outright idiot. I have no idea what I ever saw in you. You can take your stupid self right back where you came from, because my new friends and I have business to attend to.”

Dwayne looked down at his feet. Alice grinned, until he looked up again, and instead of a pleading, dim-witted expression, he revealed a gleefully confident one, as powerful as her own. “Well, so do mine,” he said, and massing on either side of him, from behind the garden’s low front fence, from behind dustbins and from behind cars, came a great gang of put-upon boyfriends, flatterers and emotional punch-bags who’d been made to suffer by their domineering dominatrixes for far too long, quivering with the exhilaration of new-found independence. “Stand aside,” said Spartacus.

And Alice did so. The rebellion made its way to the kitchen and dispersed the harridans in a trice, and freed the Beatles from their by now foul-smelling prison. They were unharmed, just about, although Ringo needed a little reviving. Rebecca saw to that. The oven was sold; Paul began to slim down again. The Sergeant Pepper sessions started in earnest.

“Care for a cake?” George offered one day, with a wicked glint in his eye.

“Yes, I will actually,” Paul said, agreeably. “It’s all right,” he laughed, seeing Ringo’s nervousness. “I’m not obsessed with them anymore. But still,” he mused, turning it reverently in his hands, “happiness is a warm bun.”

Wendy Slater is a 19 year old undergraduate at St. Anne's College in England, studying for a degree in Classics. Since she was small (which she continues to be to this day), she has been a Beatles fan, particularly of the White Album.  She also likes to read, sleep late, barrack tutors, and spend time with her two dogs. She has written creatively for years but only recently has begun to compose longer stories.

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