Nat has been seeing a lot of his new friend Mark F. Indeed, he has even discovered what the mysterious F stands for. Curiosity got the better of him, so he plucked the entire F section for the town of Blackly from a phone box directory and perused it at his leisure whilst sitting, gently gyrating, upon a roundabout in a deserted children’s playground. As fortune would have it, he soon found a name to match Mark’s address: Farinelli. Superfluous to say, Nat then pasted the entire section of Blackly names beginning with “F” back in the temporarily vandalised telephone directory. The world’s most famous singer, an eighteenth-century virtuoso castrato, also went by this name.This fact led almost inevitably to the teasing and bullying of Mark at school, hence his reluctance to carry the family name into adult life.
Mark was a little upset with Nat at first for prying into his “skeleton in the cupboard”. However, on hearing of Nat’s own metaphorical and indeed literal embodiment of that hackneyed phrase, he confessed to a great pride in his Italian pseudoaristocratic surname. Mark did stress that Nat was not to pass on this newly gleaned fragment of highly personal information. It is pleasing that Nat knows that he can trust me. Mark Farinelli also has a band and the two have been sharing gigs, mainly in deconsecrated churches, and very successfully.
Nat and Mark also share an abhorrence of the telephone, to the degree that they wish that Mr. A.G. Bell had been drowned at birth! Ironic, then, that it was via the accoutrements of this device that Nat came to know Mark’s name.
Nat’s phobia of telephones dates back to a bad childhood experience when he picked up the receiver, only to be frightened by a “disembodied doomy voice” booming at him. However, the postal service suits their purposes quite nicely. It is they who insist on terrorising innocent G.P.O. employees. Only the other week Nat sent Mark a minute papier mache coffin, with scarcely enough room for stamp and address, and with a plasticine “baby” inside. The words, scrawled in a tiny hand, were: “to be received by Marco Farinelli … if undelivered please bury”. Incredibly, it did arrive at the Farinelli household, completely crushed but much to “Marco’s” delight. Nat now awaits with bated breath to see what abomination Mark can concoct by way of a reply.
I suggested that they curtail these excesses lest they infringe obscenity laws. Nat casually informed me that Mark’s epistolary endeavours had already engendered a visit from the “Blasphemy Squad”—I have never heard of such an entity before. Certain indecent comments had been written about Jesus Christ on an envelope. Mark was let off with a stern warning, but he was not sufficiently shaken to cease embellishing his missives entirely.