Tom Sharpe - The Throwback

'Ye'll go no more a-wandering by the light of the moon,' he said cheerfully and went out locking the door. It was true. When Mr Dodd took her breakfast up he found Mrs Flawse staring dementedly at the ceiling, gibbering to herself.

Down in the cellar Mr Taglioni gibbered too. Mrs Flawse's eruption and hysteria in the cellar had completed his demoralization. It had been bad enough to stuff a dead man but to have his work interrupted in the middle of the night by a wailing widow had been too much for him.

'Take me home,' he pleaded with Lockhart, 'take me home.'

'Not before you've finished,' said Lockhart implacably. 'He's got to speak and wave his hands.'

Mr Taglioni looked up at the masked face.

'Taxidermy's one thing. Marionettes another,' he said. 'You wanted him stuffed, you got him stuffed. Now you say I got to make him speak. What you want? Miracles? You better ask God for those.'

'I'm not asking anyone. I'm telling,' said Lockhart and produced the small loudspeaker. 'You put that where his larynx is…'

'Was,' said Mr Taglioni, 'I no leave nothing inside."

'Was then,' continued Lockhart, 'and then I want this receiver put in his head.' He showed Mr Taglioni the miniature receiver. Mr Taglioni was adamant.

'No room. His head is stuffed with cotton wool.'

'Well take some out and put this in and leave space for the batteries. And while you're about it I want his jaw to move. I've an electric motor here. Look, I'll show you.'

For the rest of the morning, the late Mr Flawse was wired for sound and by the time they had finished it was possible to hear his heart beat when a switch was pulled. Even his eyes, now those of the tiger, swivelled in his head at the touch of a button on the remote control. About the only thing he couldn't do was walk or lie down flat. For the rest he looked rather healthier than he had done of late and certainly sounded as articulate.

'Right,' said Lockhart when they had tested him out, 'Now you can drink your fill.'

'Who?' said Mr Taglioni, by this time thoroughly confused. 'Him or me?'

'You,' said Lockhart and left him to his own devices and the contents of the wine cellar. He went upstairs to find that Mr Dodd was also drunk. The sound of his Master's voice issuing from that fearful effigy in the cellar had been too much even for his sturdy soul and he was half-way through a bottle of his own Northumbrian brew. Lockhart took the whisky from him.

' I'll need your help to get the old man to bed,' he said, 'he's stiff in the hip joints and needs levering round corners. 5

Mr Dodd demurred but eventually between them they got Mr Flawse, clad in his red flannel nightgown, into bed where he sat up bellowing and calling on the Almighty to save his soul.

'You've got to admit he's very realistic,' said Lockhart. 'It is just a pity we didn't think of taping his utterances earlier.'

'It's more a pity we ever thought of taping them at all,' said Mr Dodd drunkenly, 'and I wish his jaw wouldna go up and down like that. It puts me in mind of a goldfish with asthma.'

'But the eyes are about right,' said Lockhart. 'I got them from the tiger.'

'Ye dinna have to tell me,' said Mr Dodd and surprisingly broke into Blake. 'Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forests of the night. What demented hand and eye framed thy awful circuitry?'

"I did,' said Lockhart proudly, 'and I'm fixing him a wheelchair so that he can move about the house on his own and I'll direct it by remote control. That way no one will suspect he isn't still alive and I'll have time to see if this Mr Boscombe in Arizona is my father,'

'Boscombe? A Mr Boscombe?' said Mr Dodd. 'And for why would you be thinking he was your father?'

'He wrote a great many letters to my mother,' said Lockhart and explained how he had got them.

'Ye'll be wasting your time ganning after the man,' said Mr Dodd. 'Miss Deyntry was right. I recall the little man and he was a poor wee thing that your mither had no time for. You had best look closer home.'

'He's the only lead I've got,' said Lockhart, 'unless you can suggest a more likely candidate.'

Mr Dodd shook his head. 'I'll tell you this though. The auld bitch has got wind of what ye're up to and knows the old man is dead. If ye gan off to America she'll find a way out of the house to alert Mr Bullstrode. Ye saw what she did the other night. The woman's desperate dangerous and there's the Italian down below is a witness to the deed. Ye hadna thought of that.'

Lockhart pondered a while. 'I was going to take him back to Manchester,' he said. 'He has no idea where he has been.'

'Aye but he's a fine knowledge of the house and he's seen our faces,' said Mr Dodd, 'and with the woman hollering that the man was stuffed it will take no time for the law to put two and two together.'

Down in the cellar Mr Taglioni had put far more than two and two together and was drinking himself insensible on crusted port. He sat surrounded by empty bottles proclaiming in garbled tones that he was the finest stuffer in the world. It was not a word he liked to use but his tongue could no longer wrap itself round anything so polysyllabic as taxidermist.

'There he goes again with his blathering and boasting,' said Mr Dodd as they stood at the top of the cellar steps, 'the finest stuffer in the world indeed. The word has too many meanings for my liking.'

Mrs Flawse shared his distaste. Tied to the bed on which she herself had been stuffed by her late stuffed husband Mr Tag-lioni's repertoire filled her with dread. Mr Flawse did not help. Mr Dodd had inserted a tape cassette labelled 'Family History, Findings In', which thanks to Lockhart's electronic ingenuity no sooner ended than it rewound itself and repeated its findings ad nauseam. Since the tape was forty-five minutes long and took three to rewind Mrs Flawse was subjected from below to Mr Taglioni's drunken boasts and from the bedroom across the landing to endless re-runs of the tale of Headman Flawse, Bishop Flawse going to the stake, and a recitation of Minstrel Flawse's song beneath the gibbet. It was this last which affected her.

'I gan noo wha ma organs gan

When oft I lay abed, So rither hang me upside doon

Than by ma empty head.'

The first stanza was bad enough but the rest were even worse. By the time Mrs Flawse had heard the old man apparently demand fifteen times that Sir Oswald's arse be prised apart and he be given back his prick because he couldn't wait for Oswald to die before he had a pee, his widow was in much the same condition. Not that she wanted a prick, but she certainly couldn't wait much longer to have a pee. And all day Lockhart and Mr Dodd sat out of earshot in the kitchen debating what to do.

'We canna let the Latin go,' said Mr Dodd. 'It would be better to dispose of him altogether.'

But Lockhart's mind was working along more economical lines. Mr Taglioni's repeated boast that he was the world's finest stuffer and the ambiguity of that remark gave him pause for thought. And Mr Dodd's attitude was strange. His adamant denial that Mr Boscombe in Dry Bones was Miss Flawse's lover and his own father had been convincing. When Mr Dodd said something it was invariably true. Certainly he didn't lie to Lockhart – or hadn't in the past. And now he was stating categorically that the letters were no clue. It was what Miss Deyn-try and the old Romany had warned him. 'Paper and ink will do you no good.' Lockhart accepted the fact and yet without Mr Boscombe he was without the possibility of finding his father before it was known that his grandfather was dead. Mr Dodd was right on that point. Mrs Flawse knew and knowing would tell as soon as she was released. Her screams rising to a crescendo that drowned even old Mr Flawse's Family History and Mr Taglioni's garbled utterances decided Lockhart to go to her relief. By the time he unlocked the bedroom door she was screaming that if she didn't have a pee soon it was less a question of anyone else dying than of her bursting. Lockhart untied her and she wobbled to the earth closet. When she returned to the kitchen Lockhart had made up his mind,