Anthony the Anteater

Eddie was very happy when Anthony the Anteater moved in with him. He was in many ways the perfect companion: intelligent, witty and with a wizened sense of humour. They would spend many an evening just shooting the breeze.

When they did watch a TV programme or got to a movie, Anthony had excellent taste, his recommendations were always excellent, as if he'd dedicated his life (and extraordinary snout) to sniffing out the best of forms of entertainment. Likewise music and literature, Anthony's choices were always inspired, eclectic and unpredictable. A typical evening's listening might include a Shostakovich symphony, a Japanese thrash metal band and an album of Gregorian chant recorded by a choir comprising gay Australian Presbyterians.

Anthony also did the housework. Even the ironing. Eddie would come home every day to find the bathroom cleaned, the carpets swept and washing done, dried and ironed.

The only area of difficulty was that of diet. That first night when Anthony moved in, Eddie offered to share a spag bol with him, only to be informed that Anthony only ever ate ants.

They tried all the nearby supermarkets, but none of them had a fresh ant section. Waitrose did sell dried ants, but Anthony didn't enjoy these at all. "Food's no fund if it isn't running around inside your mouth trying to escape," he explained.

"I know what to do," Eddie said, for he was an innovative man, keen to keep his new flat mate and ne'er shy of an idea. "You always hear about houses with ant infestations, I'll simply walk round the neighbourhood and offer your services to any house with a problem."

"It sounds like a win-win," said Anthony.

Eddie must have knocked on a hundred doors or more. He recognised many of the people he called upon, it was a small neighbourhood after all, but many people he had never seen before, as if they had spent their entire lives shut up in their houses never going out for fear of being seen.

Eventually he found what he was looking for. A young woman opened the door, someone he had seen around the neighbourhood, and who introduced herself as Petronella.

Eddie was shown into the house and, sure enough, there were ants everywhere, sprawled out on the sofa watching TV, some were lying on the floor listening to the stereo through headphones, they were everywhere in the house, in the bedroom he even found a pair of ants in bed, doing whatever it is ants do in bed.

Eddie rushed back home to fetch Anthony, who soon set about addressing the ant infestation. It took him the entire night, but by the next day all the ants were gone and Anthony had feasted sufficiently that he didn't need another meal for a week.

Though Anthony had a done a thorough job of devouring every ant in sight, there must have been a nest hidden somewhere near, as within a week the ants had moved back in.

It was a fortunate state of affairs, as it provided Anthony with a regular source of food without having to source a new infestated house every time he felt a bit peckish.

As a consequence of the arrangement Eddie and Anthony came to see Petronella regularly and on nights when Anthony was devouring the latest infestation Eddie and Petronella especially enjoyed being alone together, in fact they enjoyed being alone together to such an extent that they started going out with each other, and all that that involves.

It seemed inevitable that the three of them would eventually move in together into the ant-infested house, but then something unexpected happened. One day Anthony announced, quite out of the blue, that he was now a vegan.

Of course, Eddie did his best to cater for Anthony's new diet, but Anthony turned his oversized nose up at all the vegetarian fare Eddie prepared for him: he disliked lentil burgers, veggie curries, chickpea stews and nut cutlets, and as for salads, Anthony never tolerated for one second the idea that salad constituted a meal. "For a rabbit perhaps, but I'm not a rabbit, I'm an anteater."

It seemed that finding suitable food for a vegan anteater would prove an impossible problem, but by good fortune the very next day one of the new meat-substitute-ant-burger restaurants opened nearby and Anthony became their most regular and valued customer.

It did leave one problem, however, dealing with the regular infestation in Petronella's apartment now that Anthony was a vegan. The first time that the ants returned Anthony showed Eddie how to tie the ants antenna and legs together with dental floss and leave the out for the bin men, but it was an exhausting fight that Eddie didn't relish repeating every week, besides which they'd used up all the dental floss.

Thankfully Eddie had another idea. He'd noticed that the ants only ever read the glossy magazines Petronella left around the house, they had no time for the classic literature on her bookcase or the serious newspapers. So he asked a friend in publishing to mock up some fake glossies using text he wrote especially.

Based on a religious story of a demented god going mad and flooding the world, and some clever humans escaping by boat, he fed the gullible ants tales of a god of fury about to flood the world. At the same time, he left a build-your-own-ark kit at the back of the shed.

As planned, the ants were fooled by the tales in the fake glossies, found the ark-kit and were soon busy busying themselves constructing the ark, which once completed, they occupied in anticipation of the coming flood.

Eddie and Anthony waited until all the ants were asleep before sneaking the ants' ark onto a trailer, which Eddie attached to his car and drove to the coast. They carried the ark with the still-sleeping ants within, pushed it into the sea and out into the wide ocean, never to be seen again.

It seemed the perfect ending to the story. All the ants were gone, the nest emptied entirely, meaning no more infestations.

But the perfect ending doesn't exist in the real world. A few weeks later Eddie was listening to the news on the radio and heard about a boat full of crazed pirate ants who were terrorising shipping. Eddie realised that he was to blame and he was responsible for sorting the ant-pirates out once and for all.

The story was only just beginning.