Robert Rankin - The Antipope

“I have not,” said Jim, “but Father, I would have a few words with you if I may.”

“Certainly.” The priest seated himself, placing the empty sherry glass noisily upon the table. It vastly amused Pooley that even a priest of such olympian leanings was not averse to a couple of free sherries. Pooley obliged and the young priest thanked him graciously.

“Firstly,” said Jim in a confidential tone, “I have been given to understand that Hairy Dave and Jungle John were doing a great deal more construction work for you than a set of gymnasium bars. I heard mention of an entire chapel or the like being built.”

“Did you now?” The young priest seemed genuinely baffled. “Well I know nothing of that, chapel is it?”

“I took it to be R.C., because the plans were in Latin.”

The priest laughed heartily. “Sure you are taking the rise out of me Jim Pooley, although the joke is well appreciated. The Church has not drawn up its plans in Latin since the fifteenth century.”

Jim shrugged and sniffed at his steaming beer. “Stranger and stranger,” said he.

“Strange, is it?” said the priest. “It is indeed strange that those lads downed tools last Thursday night and never returned to be paid for what they had so far accomplished, for those fellows that I would call strange.”

Jim sighed once more. Something was going on in Brentford and it seemed not only he was involved. “Father,” said Jim with a terrible suddenness, “what do you know of evil?”

The priest raised his fine dark eyebrows and stared at Pooley in wonder. “That my son, is a most unexpected question.”

“I mean real evil,” said Pooley, “not petty getting off the bus without paying evil, or the sin of pride or anger or minor trivial forms of evil, I mean real pure dark evil, the creeping sinister evil which lurks at the corners of men’s minds, the low horrible…”

The priest broke in upon him. “Come now,” said he, “these are not fine things to talk of on a hot summer’s day, all things bright and beautiful as they are.”

Pooley studied the honest face of the young priest. What could he know of real evil? Nothing whatever Jim concluded.

“My son,” said Father Moity, noting well Pooley’s disturbed expression, “what is troubling you?”

Pooley smiled unconvincingly. “Nothing,” he said, “just musing I suppose. Of Dave and John, I have seen nothing. Possibly they drink now at the New Inn or Jack Lane’s, I should try there if I were you.”

The priest thanked Jim, wished him all of God’s blessing for the balance of the day and jogged from the bar.

Pooley returned to his melancholic reverie. When Neville called time at three he left the bar, his half of light ale still steaming in its glass, and shambled out into the glare. He wandered off down Sprite Street and crossed beside his beloved memorial bench to enter the sweeping tree-lined drive which curved in a graceful arc towards the Butts Estate. He passed within a few yards of the Professor’s front door and crunched over the gravel footway before the Seamen’s Mission to emerge through the tiny passageway into the lower end of the High Street near the canal bridge.

As he leant upon the parapet, squinting along the dried-up stretch of ex-waterway into the shimmering distance, Pooley’s thoughts were as parched and lifeless as the blistered canal bed. He wondered what had become of Soap Distant. Had he been blasted to dark and timeless oblivion by the floor tide which engulfed him, or had the rank waters carried him deep into the inner earth where even now he swapped drinking stories with old Rigdenjyepo and the denizens of that sunless domain? He wondered at Archroy’s misery and at what urgent business might have lured Hairy Dave and his hirsute twin from their Friday payment at St Joan’s.

Pooley tried to marshal his thoughts into some plan of campaign, but the sun thrashed down relentlessly upon his curly head and made him feel all the more dizzy and desperate. He would repair to the Plume Café for a cup of char, that would invigorate and refresh, that was the thing, the old cup that cheers. Pooley dragged his leathern elbows from the red-hot parapet and plodded off up the High Street.

The door of the Plume was wedged back and a ghastly multi-coloured slash curtain hung across the opening. Pooley thrust the gaudy plastic strips apart and entered the café. The sudden transition from dazzling sunlight to shadowy gloom left him momentarily blind and he clung to a cheap vinyl chair for support.

Lily Marlene lurked within, fanning her abundant mammaries with a menu card and cooling her feet in a washbowl of iced water. She noted Pooley’s entrance without enthusiasm. “We still give no credit, Jim Pooley.”

Pooley’s eyes adjusted themselves, and he replied cheerfully, if unconvincingly, “I return from foreign parts, my pockets abulge with golden largesse of great value.”

“It’s still sixpence a cup,” the dulcet voice returned, “or eight pence for a coffee.”

“Tea will be fine,” said Pooley producing two threepenny bits from his waistcoat pocket.

The grey liquid flowed from the ever-bubbling urn into the chipped white cup and Pooley bore his steaming prize to a window table. Other than Jim the café contained but a single customer. His back was turned and his shoulders hunched low over his chosen beverage, but the outline of the closely cropped head was familiar. Jim realized that he was in close proximity to the semi-mythical entity known as the Other Sam.

Strange rumours abounded regarding this bizarre personage, who was reputed to live the life of a recluse somewhere within an uncharted region of the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew. Exactly who he was or where he came from was uncertain. It was said that he rowed nightly across the Thames in a coracle of ancient design to consort with Vile Tony Watkins, who ran the yellow street-cleaning cart, a grim conveyance which moved mysteriously through the lamplit byways.

Vile Tony was an uncommunicative vindictive, with an ingrained distrust of all humanity and a dispassionate hatred for anything that walked upon two legs and held its head aloft during the hours of sunlight. Being a deaf-mute he kept his own counsel no matter what should occur.

Pooley had never spoken with the Other Sam, but felt a certain strange comfort in the knowledge of his being. The stories which surrounded him were uniformly weird and fantastical. He was the last of a forgotten race, some said; daylight would kill him, some said, for his eyes had never seen it. Others said that during her pregnancy his mother had observed something which had gravely affected her and that the midwife upon seeing the child had dropped it in horror, whereupon the tiny creature had scampered from the room and disappeared into the night.

Pooley the realist pooh-poohed such notions, but Pooley the mystic, dreamer and romantic sensed the aura of pagan mystery which surrounded the crop-headed man.

“Will you not join me at table, James Pooley,” said a voice which weakened Jim’s bladder in a manner that formerly only large libations of ale had been able to do. “I would have words with you.”

Pooley rose from his chair and slowly crossed the mottled linoleum floor of the Plume, wondering whether a leg-job might be preferable to a confrontation that most of Brentford’s population would have taken great lengths to avoid.

“Be seated, James.” The face which met Jim’s guarded glance was hardly one to inspire horror; it was pale, such was to be expected of one who dwelt in darkness, but it was a face which held an indefinable grandeur, an ancient nobility. “Your thoughts press heavily upon me, James Pooley,” said the Other Sam.

“I do not know which way to turn,” said Jim, “such responsibilities are beyond my scope.”