Sentence The Fourhundredandsixtysixth

Almost five months have elapsed since the birth of little Levy Balquhidder, and his doting parents, Inverary and Sarsparilla, still dote, naturally enough, though they have been worn down, ground down, razed almost to the ground by the unanticipated and thoroughly inconsiderate demands which one tiny baby can make on two fit, intelligent and capable adults, although that fitness, intelligence and capability somehow disappeared through cracks in their previously idyllic marriage, to leave 

them floundering, around 3.00 or 4.00 am when they are awakened for the fifth time that night, every night, for four long months; yes, only four, because the first month had been bliss, perfect bliss, with wee Levy tanking up on Rilla's cream-heavy breast-milk three or four times a day then sleeping for

seven hours solid until he was one month old, when someone seemed to have thrown a switch inside him and turned him into Hell-Boy! until last night – for it seemed that the impossible had happened

and when Rary woke naturally at 9am this morning, from a highly realistic dream about an antipodean platypusary and looked at the bedside clock, realising that he should already be at his desk in the Melrose office of Balquhidder and Poon, Solicitors and Estate Agents, he leapt from his bed and dashed to his son's cot, fearful that some mishap such as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome had overtaken the wee laddie, but what he found was that lad himself, still bleary with sleep after 12 hours, gurgling and happily playing with the mobile above his cot, laughing at the animal figures as they moved round to the theme tune of The Magic Roundabout and so delighted was he. Rary, that he dashed back to wake his sleeping wife, without even wondering how it was that little Levy could

have possibly managed to reach the remote control where it was always left on the nearby chest of drawers a few feet away, in order to start the mobile on it's repetitive journey, and which was now lying under his blanket – somewhere in his newly forming brain, an inherited knowledge or instinct must be surfacing, perhaps derived from some skill, experience or ingenious precocity which may have descended from James McLevy the famous Edinburgh Detective or, perhaps of even greater significance, from some more recent incarnation, for was it not just the kind of talent that might have been present in a person such as the mysteriously disappeared Pherson Dalwhinnie, former spy-catcher turned spy, a modern example of the very obverse of that old poacher turned gamekeeper analogy? hmm, who could possibly say?