Robert Rankin - Necrophenia

Which I did not.

But I gawped at that album cover. Gawped at it and felt a tad more sick. Well, more than a tad, an avalanche of pukiness. It had to be a hoax of some kind, surely. We hadn’t even had a single single out. How could there be Greatest Hits album? It was a trick, wasn’t it?

I pulled out the vinyl record inside. It certainly looked real enough, though.

‘Careful with your fingers on that,’ said the barman. ‘I know there’s millions of them about, but that one is mine.’

‘Millions?’ I said, in a breathless, whispery voice. And I peered closely at that record. And I read the date upon it: 1973.

‘It’s a fake,’ I cried. ‘Nineteen seventy-three! It’s a fake.’

‘No, it’s not,’ said the barman. ‘It came out in nineteen seventy-three. I know it’s four years old, but it’s mine and it’s signed, so hand it back here.’

‘Four years old?’ I said. ‘Nineteen seventy-seven?’ I said.

‘Do you know what?’ said the barman. ‘The Sumerian Kynges did stay in this hotel. Way back in nineteen sixty-nine, it was, before my time. That must have been about the time New York was going for the Jewish look and folk were dressing the way you’re dressed now.’

I sank down onto my bar stool. But missed my bar stool and fell down onto the floor.

‘You’re drunk,’ cried the barman. ‘I’m calling the doorman. He’ll make it look like self-defence.’

‘No,’ I blubbered and I got to my knees. ‘Something is very wrong. It can’t be nineteen seventy-seven. It was only nineteen sixty-nine this very morning. The Sumerian Kynges were leaving tomorrow to play Woodstock.’

‘I understand they were brilliant at Woodstock,’ said the barman, leaning over the bar counter to further enjoy, it appeared, the spectacle of me on my knees on the floor. ‘I wasn’t there myself. Too young. And The Kynges don’t appear in the movie of the festival. Contractual differences, apparently. Which is why The Beatles and Bob Dylan, who also played there, aren’t in the movie.’

‘What?’ I went. ‘What? What? What?’ It couldn’t be true, could it? Nearly nine years had passed. The Sumerian Kynges had become world famous without me and had a Greatest Hits album out. Was I dreaming this? And if not, how could it have happened?

I climbed giddily to my feet. ‘I need another drink,’ I told the barman. ‘And I will pay in cash.’

‘Happy to serve you, sir.’

I paid in cash and happily I had enough. I quite expected the barman to tell me that my money was out of date and thus no good, but he didn’t. Apparently American dollars have remained the same for the last one hundred years. Apparently so that if you do commit a bank robbery and get caught and sent to jail, but manage to avoid giving back any of the money, it will be waiting for you wherever you buried it, ready for use when you get out of prison. And not be out of date. It is something to do with the American Dream, Democracy and Freemasons running the world. Or something.

So the barman accepted my money.

And I tucked into my bourbon.

‘Has the mobile phone been invented yet?’ I asked the barman. ‘Or the jet-pack?’

The barman shook his head sadly. ‘Shall I call for the doorman?’ he asked.

And I shook my head. Sadly. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I will be all right. I won’t cause any trouble. Something very weird has happened to me. I must have lost my memory or something. Perhaps I had an accident.’

The barman eyed me, queerly. ‘Are you telling me,’ he asked, ‘that the last memory you have is of nineteen sixty-nine?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It seems so. One minute it’s nineteen sixty-nine and I am over on Twenty-Seventh Street. Then I run back here and it’s nineteen seventy-seven. How weird is that?’

‘Most weird,’ and the barman nodded. ‘Twenty-Seventh Street. That used to be the Detective Quarter, didn’t it?’

‘Used to be?’ I shrugged.

‘Nice shrugging,’ the barman observed. ‘Did you know that the Shrugger once got drunk in this bar?’

‘I just bet he did,’ I said. ‘I was with The Sumerian Kynges, you know, really I was. And we were in New York with The Flange Collective.’

‘I’ve read about that – a sort of freak show, wasn’t it?’

‘Something like that, yes. I wonder whatever became of it.’

‘It closed this very year. The Flange, that was the guy who ran it, retired to Brentford in England to pursue a sacred quest of his – to create The Lounge Room of Christ, to bring about the Second Coming of Jesus.’

‘That is, perhaps, a little bit more than I can take in at the moment. Although I do think he might have talked about that. Although it’s getting a bit hazy now. But then, I suppose it was over eight years ago.’

The barman went off to serve some normal people. I picked up a copy of American Hero Today magazine from the bar top and gave its cover a good looking over. It was the March edition for nineteen seventy-seven. I gulped down some more Kentucky bourbon and made a mournful face. What was I going to do now? Where was I going to go? I supposed I could assume that Papa Crossbar wasn’t going to have me killed. But, I supposed also, that it was he who had done this to me somehow. Through voodoo? I didn’t know, but somehow. But perhaps I was free of him. Because what was I going to do, expose him? Tell everyone what I knew about him?

What, a mad boy with a defective memory? The more I thought about this, the more it all fell into place. In a weird and twisted fashion.

And I wondered, and I feared, too, just what had been happening during these missing years. Was most of the world now dead? How far had the bad things gone? I rubbed my hands at my temples. If I wasn’t careful, I might soon become a truly mad boy.

And mad boy? Had I aged? That was an interesting one. I took myself off to the toilet, which hadn’t really changed much. But for the bowl of flowers and the nail brushes. I examined myself in the mirror. I hadn’t changed at all. Which meant that although nearly nine years had passed for the rest of the world, they had not done so for me.

So what did that make me? Something special? Someone special? I liked the idea of that. Although I suppose I had always considered myself to be someone special. So this was confirmation, really, wasn’t it? In fact, perhaps God had done this, and not Papa Crossbar. I liked the idea of that.

And I gazed at my reflection in the mirror. ‘I am really, truly messed up here,’ I told it. ‘My thinking is all out of kilter. I’m lost and alone and falling to pieces.’ And I gazed some more at my reflection. But my reflection did not have anything to say on the matter, so I returned to the bar.

The barman was awaiting my return.

‘That’s him,’ he said to the fellow standing beside him. A burly, useful-looking fellow dressed in a doorman’s livery.

‘I don’t want any trouble,’ I said. ‘If you want me to go, I’ll go.’

‘I don’t want you to go,’ said the useful-looking one. ‘I have a message for you.’

‘You do?’ I said, reseating myself. ‘Do you think you might pass it to me, along with the double bourbon on the rocks that you have most generously purchased for me?’

‘That, I think, can be done.’ The useful one nodded to the barman, who returned to his place behind the bar and did the necessary business.

‘I’ll have the same,’ said the useful one. And the same was also dispensed.

My drink was pushed in my direction and I gratefully accepted it.

‘Drink up,’ said the fellow, and I did so. ‘Now then,’ said the fellow. ‘The message.’

And I said, ‘Yes, go on please, the message?’

‘Your name is?’ asked the fellow.