Tom Sharpe - The Throwback

That night, to while away the time, he blew all the lights in the Pettigrews' house. His procedure was quite simple. Using a piece of nylon cord he attached some stiff wire from a coat-hanger to the end and lobbed it over the twin electric cables that led from the post into the house. There was a flash and the Pettigrews spent the night in darkness. Lockhart spent it telling Jessica the story of the old gipsy woman and Miss Deyntry.

'But haven't you looked at the letters?' Jessica asked.

Lockhart hadn't. The gipsy's prophecy had driven all thought of them out of his mind and besides her final prophecy that paper was wood and paper and ink would do no good till he came to his gift again had startled him superstitiously. What had she meant by his gift of tongue and song and three graves open and one unfilled? And a hanged man on a tree? All auguries of some frightening future. Lockhart's mind was too engrossed in the present and the gift he foresaw was to come from the sale of all twelve houses in Sandicott Crescent, which he had already calculated would gross Jessica over six hundred thousand pounds at present-day prices.

'But we'll have to pay taxes on them, won't we?' said Jessica when he explained that she would shortly be a rich woman. 'And anyway we don't know that everyone is going to leave…'

She left the question open but Lockhart didn't answer it. He knew.

'Least said soonest mended,' he said cryptically and waited for his preparations for Colonel Finch-Potter's self-eviction to take effect.

'I still think you should see what is inside those letters,' Jessica said as they went to bed that night. 'They might contain proof of your father's identity.'

'There's time enough for that,' said Lockhart. 'What's in those letters will keep.'

What was in the French letter that Colonel Finch-Potter nudged over his penis at half past eight the following night had certainly kept. He was vaguely aware that the contraceptive felt more slippery than usual when he took it out of the box but the full effect of the oven cleaner made itself felt when he had got it three-quarters on and was nursing the rubber ring right down to achieve maximum protection from syphilis. The next moment all fear of that contagious disease had fled his mind and far from trying to get the thing on he was struggling to get the fucking thing off as quickly as possible and before irremediable damage had been done. He was unsuccessful. Not only was the contraceptive slippery but the oven cleaner was living up to its maker's claim to be able to remove grease baked on to the interior of a stove like lightning. With a scream of agony Colonel Finch-Potter gave up his manual efforts to get the contraceptive off before what felt like galloping leprosy took its fearful toll and dashed towards the bathroom in search of a pair of scissors. Behind him the Scarlet Woman watched with growing apprehension and when, after demonically hurling the contents of the medicine cabinet on to the floor, the Colonel still screaming found his nail scissors she intervened.

'No, no, you mustn't,' she cried in the mistaken belief that the Colonel's guilt had got the better of him and that he was about to castrate himself, 'for my sake you mustn't.' She dragged the scissors from his hand while the Colonel had he been able to speak would have explained that for her sake he must. Instead, gyrating like some demented dervish, he dragged at the contraceptive and its contents with a mania that suggested he was trying to disembowel himself. Next door but one the Pettigrews, now quite accustomed to things that went bump in the night, ignored his pleas for help before he burst. That they were mingled with the screams of the Scarlet Woman didn't surprise

them in the least. After the Racemes' disgusting display of perversion they were prepared for anything. Not so the police at the end of the road. As their car screeched to a halt outside Number 10 and they were bundled out to the scene of the latest crime they were met by the bull-terrier.

It was not the amiable beast it had been previously; it was not even the ferocious beast that had bitten Mr O'Brain and clung to him up his lattice-work; it was an entirely new species of beast, one filled to the brim with LSD by Lockhart and harbouring psychedelic vision of primeval ferocity in which policemen were panthers and even fence posts held a menace. Certainly the bull-terrier did. Gnashing its teeth, it bit the first three policemen out of the Panda car before they could get back into it, then the gatepost, broke a tooth on the Colonel's Humber, sank its fangs into the police car's front radial tyre to such effect that it was knocked off its own feet by the blow-out while simultaneously rendering their escape impossible, and went snarling off into the night in search of fresh victims.

It found them aplenty. Mr and Mrs Lowry had taken to sleeping downstairs since the explosion of Mr O'Brain's Bauhaus next door and the new explosion of the blown-out tyre brought them into the garden. Colonel Finch-Potter's illuminated bull-terrier found them there and, having bitten them both to the bone and driven them back into the house, had severed three rose bushes at the stem with total disregard for their thorns. If anything it felt provoked by creatures that bit back and was in no mood to trifle when the ambulance summoned by Jessica finally arrived. The bull-terrier had once travelled in that ambulance with Mr O'Brain and residual memories flickered in its flaming head. It regarded that ambulance as an offence against Nature and with all the impulsion of a dwarf rhinoceros put its head down and charged across the road. In the mistaken belief that it was the Pettigrews at Number 6 who needed their attention the ambulance men had stopped outside their house. They didn't stop long. The pink-eyed creature that knocked the first attendant over, bit the second and hurled itself at the throat of the third, fortunately missing and disappearing over the man's shoulder, drove them to take shelter in their vehicle, and ignoring the plight of Mr and Mrs Lowry, three policemen and the Colonel whose screams had somewhat subsided as he slashed at his penis with a breadknife in the kitchen, the ambulance men drove themselves as rapidly as possible to hospital.

They should have waited. Mr Pettigrew had just opened the front door and was explaining that for once he didn't know who was making such a fuss in the Crescent to the ambulance man who had rung the bell when something shot between his legs and up the stairs. Mr Pettigrew misguidedly shut the door, for once acting with a degree of social conscience he hadn't intended. For the next twenty minutes Colonel Finch-Potter's bull-terrier ravaged the"Pettigrew house. What it saw in tass-elled lampshades and velvet curtains, not to mention fur-belowed dressing-tables and the mahogany legs of the Pettigrews' dining suite, it alone knew, but they had evidently taken on some new and fearful meaning for it. Acting with impeccable good taste and unbelievable savagery it tore its way through these furnishings and dug holes in a Persian rug in search of some psychedelic bone while the Pettigrews cowered in the cupboard under the stairs. Finally it leapt at its own reflection in the french windows and crashed through into the night. After that its howls could be heard horrifically from the bird sanctuary. Colonel Finch-Potter's howls had long since ceased. He lay on the kitchen floor with a cheese-grater and worked assiduously and with consummate courage on the thing that had been his penis. That the corrosive contraceptive had long since disintegrated under the striations of the breadknife he neither knew nor cared. It was sufficient to know that the rubber ring remained and that his penis had swollen to three times its normal size. It was in an insane effort to grate it down from a phallic gargoyle to something more precise that the Colonel worked. And besides, the pain of the cheese-grater was positively homeopathic compared to oven cleaner and came as something of a relief albeit a minor one. Behind him garnished in suspender belt and bra the Scarlet Woman had hysterics in a kitchen chair and it was her shrieks that finally drove the three policemen in the patrol car to their duty. Bloody and bowed they broke the front door down in a wild rush provoked as much by fear of the bull-terrier as by any desire to enter the house. Once in they were in half a dozen minds whether to stay or go. The sight of a puce-faced old gentleman sitting naked on the kitchen floor using a cheese-grater on what looked like a pumpkin with high blood pressure while a woman wearing only a suspender belt shrieked and gibbered and in between whiles helped herself to a bottle of neat brandy, was not one to reassure them as to anyone's sanity. Finally to add to the pandemonium and panic the lights failed and the house was plunged into darkness. So were all the other houses in Sandicott Crescent. Lockhart, under cover of the concentration of police and ambulance men on Number 6 and 10, had slipped on to the golf course and hooked his patent fuseblower over the main power lines. By the time he got back to the house even Jessica was in a state of shock.