Ten tablecloths, ten fold-out tables, five volunteers, and a Mangrove a la pain a mouth, all came to a sum of four-hundred and twelve dollars. The servers were all volunteers from the children’s club down the road, they’d been offered the church chancel for the banquet by the cheery friar, and the date was chosen so that it was after the sell-by date of all the alcoholic-free wine at the Super Mega Market, they collected it free of charge from the bins out back. For Kelt’s auditory system, “five-thousand dollars” had the same sound as the word “profit.”

Walt’s five-thousand was in fact in the units of ‘opportunities’, not United States dollars, of which Kelt had been dreaming of. The conversion rate between the two is volatile by the second. They settled on one-thousand dollars for the hole.

And so when it came to writing off expenses and dishing losses at the end of the year, the city council had no less than one-thousand and thirty-eight dollars profit for the year, the first year this valuation had been positive. The forty-million of tax payer’s money was written off as tax deductible for the indefinite future.

Moist is what the sign read, the painter was just finishing the final stroke that would crucify the ‘t’, and crucify the sign to the front of the nook.

“Moist?” Kelt had come by to oversee Walt’s development on the hole which Kelt firmly maintained was still a nook.

“The first thing I think of when I hear the word,” and he made another rainbow with his hands, “hole.”

“What, moist? Forgive me, I know a few moist holes, but no more than one can count on three fingers. Nooks – sorry holes – speak of space, and darkness, and buttons, and… and. Well not moisture that’s for certain.” Kelt had bounced his fingers like a conductor at each adjective he thought of that reminded him of holes, or holes of them.

“No, not moisture. Moisture and holes? No.” Walt nodded at the painter, gestured for him to get off the ladder. He obliged. “I think of my mother. She was fond of holes. Great sewer, always saw a button before it popped loose on a shirt, would catch them mid-air.”

Behind the painter was the rest of the sign that had already started drying. It read “Gurty’s” in bold orange.

“Munchies,” said Walt.

“Pardon?”

“’Gurty’s Moist Munchies’,” Walt took a photo with his fingers, framed the whole nook in a rectangle of two fingers and two thumbs. “Gurty’s my ma.” Walt smiled up at the clouds. A flock of geese were busy heaving themselves across it.

“Ah,” said Kelt. “A bit of ancestral rooting does this town proud, and,” Kelt nudged a pudgey elbow into Walt and winked, “brings in a bit’o’dolla from them visitors, a fine story wrapped up in heritage like that. Established in fifteen-forty-two. Ha!” Kelt had sort of grabbed the conversational reigns from Walt and drove the carriage with a hard left off the road.

“My, my, they love that stuff, as if you could plot age on one axis, trustworthiness on the other, and draw a line straighter than an aqueduct.”

Walt nodded his way through Kelt’s barrage on company origin stories, his mind full of holes, as it always was. Thinking about what next great thing he could do with this or that hole.

This – bar his invention of holes for holding holes, now famously branded the ‘key chain’ – was by far Walt’s greatest hole conjuring trick yet.

“Waiter!,” gestured someone from a corner table.

“Hmm yes? Are sirs enjoying their meal. Another glass of milk sir?”

“R-U-B-B-U-S-H. What does that spell?” said one of the sirs. He wore a jacket that from a distance certainly looked varnished, donned with so many war medals as it was.

“The sergeant here,” Pud cut in, leaning his head sideways at his compatriot. He rolled his eyes up at the waiter with snobbish expectancy, “believes that you can’t spell the word, rub-bish, without the word bush. I for one question if our war-hardied sergeant is in fact from enemy lines and grappling with English for the first time.” Pud looked at the sergeant. “It’s certainly ten medals too many for a spy of your calibre, one who trips on the very linguistics he is intending to infiltrate.”

The waiter adopted a consternated frown of agreement, nodded and turned to the sergeant, “Are you a spy…sir?” It wasn’t his place to forget his manners, to uphold the pillars of this fine establishment, even if the enemy is right under the nose.

“Blathering idiot of course not! Who would believe that rubbish!” spat the sergeant, who, if he had had a mouthful of milk at the time would had spat it all over the other lapel of his shirt which was still milkless.

“Ha! You said it right there, rubbish, and not a bush came from your mouth, not one.” Pud felt he had the sergeant now. The waiter joined in with Pud’s chuckles of pleasure, somehow over the exchange of a few words the two had become telepathically synced.

“Look,” began the sergeant, calming himself down by stroking the ends of his jacket along his sides, “let’s just get to the linguistics of the whole thing, forget war, forget spies, forget waiterly duties.” Walt hoisted out a seat at their table and smacked the spot where he wanted the waiter to sit his bum, across the table from the two of them. The waiter looked around sheepishly and obeyed the command – the customer came first of course.

“Right now,” walk folded his fingers together and cracked them, “let’s just spell some rubbish shall we?” He dug a hand in his breast pocket and pulled out a pack of rolling papers, dug out a handful of them and used the other hand to ask the waiter for a pen, “Pen?”

The waiter obliged and the sergeant wrote seven letters on seven papers, Pud and the waiter patient as the sergeant’s shaking hand scrawled letters that a mole rat would be lucky to read. As each bite-sized piece of abstract calligraphy was finished, the sergeant added it to the row of others he was growing in the middle of the table.

“H, S, I, B, B, U, R,” read out the waiter when the sergeant had finished.

“No, R, U, B, B, I, S, H” corrected Pud. “So, you agree?”

“Yes, I also see an R, a U, two B’s, an I, an S, and one strapping looking H,” the sergeant punched the ‘H’ with a finger, a finger that wasn’t new to punching H’s.

“So… you agree?” Pud repeated, but knowing the sergeant, he smelled a trap, a big milky trap closing in around him and his new telepathic ally.

The waiter sensed it too.

The sergeant did something with his fingers, it was far more graceful than what he’d done with his fingers a few moments ago, which was try to write English letters on strips of rolling paper. What the sergeant did was pick this letter here, spin that paper there, in a flash swap R’s with U’s and U’s with B’s and B’s with R’s, he flipped some of them flipped them back up. It was all a blur to Pud and the waiter, their heads shook like cats in a catnip trance as they tried to track the finger circus the sergeant was putting on for them.

When he finished, the sergeant leaned back, folded his finger army away inside his armpits, and adopted the face of someone who was well chuffed.

“So?” said the sergeant.

On the table was the handiwork, was a divine proof, of the sergeant’s prior pontification. What once was a row of letters that spelled “R-U-B-B-I-S-H,” now had adopted an alternative identity, one which spelled “R-I-B-B-U-S-H.”