Robert Rankin - The Sprouts of Wrath

“Norman, you are a caution,” said Pooley, taking the glasses up to the bar. As he stood waiting to be served he pondered upon the rare coincidence that Norman had conceived and constructed the very means by which he and the Professor could enter the stadium, exactly when it was required, and that he should just happen to bump into him at the very moment. Many would argue that such a chance was one in a million, improbable to the point of near impossibility and they would no doubt be absolutely right.

By “towels up”, Pooley was what the English magician Crowley referred to as “nice drunk”. He wandered off down the Ealing Road, hands in pockets, roll-up between his teeth. Jim paused a moment outside Bob the Bookie’s, considering what form his retribution should take. It would have to keep for the present, Bob’s security was of the Fort Knox persuasion and Jim did not possess the necessary military hardware to storm the premises. “You will get yours,” he told the iron-bound doorway. Out of sheer badness, Jim ran his pocket-knife down the length of Bob’s parked Rolls-Royce and signed his handiwork with a flourished JP.

Half-way down the Albany Road, he wondered if he should pop into the Police Station and report the shabby man’s attempt on his life. Attempted murder was a punishable offence after all. But Jim’s recent encounters with the law, particularly that personified by Inspectre Hovis, led him to consider this action pure folly. And of course the Professor had said that he preferred no police intervention in his schemes.

Jim steered his shabby shoe in the direction of the allotments. He hadn’t been down that way for weeks and his own plot was in a sorry state. The rhubarb was running to seed, sending out its hideous tendrils towards the potato patch, and the runner beans were ripe for harvesting.

He unpadlocked the door of his hut, savouring that special aroma which is unique to the interiors of allotment sheds. He sought out a bottle of private stock from its secret hideaway and a folding garden-chair of uncertain security. Labouring bravely at its rusted springs, he set the thing up before his hut doorway, settled into it and uncorked the bottle. A sip or two told him that it was cabbage wine, one of Norman’s specials, not a great vintage, but acceptable to his present condition. He picked a bit of stalk from his teeth and took another slug.

His thoughts turned almost at once to the comforts of the old barge which had been, until so recently, the headquarters of the P & O Line. That all seemed so long ago now. Another world. Jim became reflective in the way that only a drunken man can. He had not yet come to terms with the prospect of life without John. The future seemed an empty affair. Even if he got out of all this business with his life and copped the ten million smackers, the future looked far from rosy.

There was an ache in him that would not go away. It was the ache that he had felt when his father died. But then Omally had been there to comfort him in his time of loss. They had gone down to the undertakers together to say their farewells to the old man. Jim had placed a packet of fags in his pocket to send him on his way, John had shaken the dead man’s hand and then the two of them had gone off on a week-long drunk. They had raised their glasses together, made many toasts and drunk away the sorrow. The ache had been soothed away, leaving nothing but the warmth of happy memories. But now Jim was truly alone and he sighed mournfully. He didn’t even have a body to weep over or a grave to place flowers upon. He can’t be dead, Jim told himself. He just can’t be, I won’t let him.

“You must let him go,” the Professor had said. “A soul cannot be truly free until it is released by the bereaved. You must let him go.”

“Never.” Jim swigged greatly from the dusty bottle. “Not until I know, not until I am really sure. But whatever …” He rose to his feet and shook his clenched fist towards the stadium. “You will pay for this, you will pay and pay. Whoever you are, whatever you are, you will pay.” Jim sank once more into his knackered chair. “But I just wish I knew how,” he muttered to himself.

“They’re at it again,” Mrs Butcher informed her hen-pecked spouse. “They’re up to their old tricks again.” Mr Butcher cowered in the Parker Knoll and took shelter behind his Angling Times . “Go out there, do something.”

Mr Butcher ventured a hopeful. “They’re not doing any harm, dear,” but his good lady wife knew it was coming and slapped away his paper with her polishing cloth. “Get out there,” she cried.

“A fellow caught a twenty-seven pound pike down at the cut last week on a number nine hook, just fancy that.”

“I’ll fancy something in a minute,” said his wife, in the way some wives are renowned for. “Get out there, Reg, you tell them.”

“Tell them what, dear? They’re only dancing, there’s no harm in that.”

“No harm in that? It’s heathen.” His wife crossed herself before the plastic Virgin on the mantelshelf. “They are godless savages.”

“They’re not savages, dear, they’re on the town council.”

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong, they got the sack, them with their evil heathen ways.” She made threatening motions towards the instrument of many others’ torture. “I shall make a phone call.”

“No, don’t do that.” Mr Butcher picked up his paper, folded it into the Peerage brass galleon rack and slipped his darned and stockinged feet into his Christmas slippers. “Don’t phone.” The phone bill nearly rivalled the national debt these days. “I’ll go out to them.”

“You just tell them to stop it. It’s not decent, this is a respectable neighbourhood, or at least it was until …” With his wife’s words coming hard upon his slippered heels, Mr Butcher hurried through the kitchen door and into the back-garden.

“Lads,” he called over the fence, “lads, I say.”

Paul and Barry Geronimo ignored his calls. They wore the full tribal regalia of the Sioux Medicine Man, Buffalo Horns, beaded hangings, buckskin loin-cloth, the whole bit. And they danced on regardless.

The dance was the Dance of Invocation to the Great Spirit. It would last for thirty-six hours, with only the occasional break for more Peyote or a trip to the toilet. During the latter stages of the dance Mrs Butcher would be carried, foaming at the mouth, into an ambulance and carted off for a period of intensive care at the “special” hospital in Hanwell. Mr Butcher, for his part, would wave his wife the fondest of farewells, do a little dance of his own and take his Angling Times down to the Flying Swan, where he would do away with a month’s housekeeping money with a reckless abandon unknown to him during the last twenty years.

But these things were for the future and so at present he leaned further over the fence and continued to call out imprecations to his dancing neighbours. It wasn’t for himself, he told them, he had no objections. The sound of beating tom-toms was music to his ears. It was his wife, you see, she suffered with her nerves, she was not a well woman. “Lads?” he called. “Eh, lads?”

The evening turned into night and the night into the coming day. And it was another good one. The people of the borough prepared to go about their business without any particular interest. Tomorrow was coming, the great day of the games and they all had their free tickets. Well, almost all. Old Pete waved goodbye to a well-pleased punter and pecked his old lips at the bulging bundle of money-notes he now clutched in his grubby paw. “Enjoy yourself,” he called. “Come on the Bs!”

Norman had been up most of the night tinkering in his lock-up garage and the Hartnell Air Car was coming on a storm. He had definitely come up with a winner this time. As the dawn broke on the black horizon he yawned, scratched his bum, locked up the garage and trudged back to his shop for an hour or two’s shut-eye.