Chapter Ten
The Detention of Dumbledalf

Dumbledalf sat in a specially designed chair in a pleasant room in a converted old house called Hogsendell, at the very end of the valley of Grimauladris. He had gone there in the hope of convalescence after putting his back out in a bit of boisterous high spirits and other antics with young Dr Sara Mann from the Chemistry Department. All had started off well enough, until she had revealed her ‘sympathies with Rowling’s proposal’, and had started to lecture him on the benefits of formal power structures and ‘benevolent dictators’.

“You mean lining silk pockets. Have you been talking to Vol-au-vent?”, replied Dumbledalf, with concern.
“A new power is arising Dumbledalf my love”, she had continued, “We can join with that power. It would be wise”.
“Don’t be ridiculous Sara Mann”, countered Dumbledalf, “Concentrating power is the opposite of good governance, and ethics too for that matter. Has he visited you?”
“No!”, she replied, defensively, but then softened. “Don’t be jealous Merly”. She looked at his concerned face.
“He could re-establish the University’s reputation. It could be very great, and we could be part of it, Merly”, she said. Dumbledalf’s expression had changed to one of pity, and her confidence waned at the sight of it.
She spoke again, “His plan is persuasive, Merly”, she said, half-heartedly, but inside she felt a little bit silly, as she realised she’d been duped, so she tried to change the subject.

“Look! How do you like my new cocktail dress?”, she asked, taking her cardy off with a flourish that knocked over her glass of claret.
“Ah!” she cried, “My dress!”.
“I liked white better”, replied Dumbledalf.
“Smart arse!” snapped Sara Mann, “It’s your fault for getting me all in a tiz over Vol-au-vent”.
“I did indeed, but only one hand at a time can wield the Vanish. Let me do it. Here, perhaps you’d better take it off. I’ll see what I can do with it you’d like to … er… slip into something more comfortable”.
“Merly!”, squeaked Sara with a grin and mock offence. “It sounds like it’s you who wants to slip in something comfortable”, she said, with a very big smile indeed. Very big; a wide grin in fact…. and a twinkle in her eye.
‘Well bless my beard’, thought Dumbledalf, ‘This is a turn up’, and he gave her pert bottom a gentle pat as she ran off in bra and the skimpiest knickers. ‘Boy oh boy! Could it be my lucky day?’, he mused again, as he skipped into the kitchen to find the Vanish. The first thing he saw in the cupboard, however, was a bottle of pills for pubic ringworm sufferers. “Oh balls!”, he sighed, “Still”, he reflected more soberly, “a small dose is a fairly small price to pay for such a prize, if I do actually win it”, he reflected in an afterthought.

All such doubts of the latter sort left him when he returned to the living room. Dr Sara Mann, wearing a shirt tantalisingly unbuttoned to just above the navel, and no bra, so that the sides of her breasts were obvious and tantalising, a very short mini skirt and tantalising thigh-length leather boots, handed him that pair of skimpiest knickers, and pulled him by his tie into the bedroom. Dumbledalf was tantalised.

Towards the end of the drunken scene that followed a bottle of Bailey’s, the dregs of a whisky bottle and a fondue, she had locked him, naked except for his beard, socks and garters, in an old applewood wardrobe, while she saw to herself just outside with the neck of an empty bottle of Laphroaig, panting and groaning a yard away from his ear, which was pressed firmly against the door. In his enthusiasm to escape and ‘give the little minx one she wouldn’t forget in a hurry’, the wardrobe tipped over, thrusting one of a pair of black Japanese ‘love balls’ right up his jacksy.

At the Accident and Emergency Department, he told the medical staff that he had been dancing in the garden under a new moon with a glass of sherry, and had tripped over a waste paper basket that had been left outside, landing heavily on a piece of modern art. On hearing this unfeasible story, the suspicions of the medical staff were aroused, so they decided to do some tests. “Sounds like one for the Deviant’s Scrapbook”, said a nurse, with a giggle. She unlocked a drawer and took out a large folder. “We’ll have to think of a suitable name for the ‘entry’. Maybe ‘Professorial proctalgia’ would do?”, she said. After some hours of lying in some discomfort, the only consolation being a visit from an attractive brunette student who gently applied a soothing cream to his bum, a doctor came to see Dumbledalf in his side room.

“We’ve found a transcription error in your trevorglobin, and your haemogoblin is phasing in and out of our space-time continuum captain”, said Chief Phlebotomist Scott. As they examined the bruises further, however, they noticed numerous lipstick marks on his staff and, dismissing his story as fantasy, they sent him home with some ointment, and reluctantly put the scrapbook away.