Tom Sharpe - Riotous Assembly

'And what happens then?'

'He dies.'

'Yes,' said the Bishop patiently, 'but what does the rope do?'

'Holds him up.'

'No, no. It breaks his neck.'

Els knew better than that. 'Oh no, it doesn't,' he said. 'I've been practising with sacks and it doesn't break their necks. Their bottoms drop out. It makes no end of a mess.'

The Bishop shuddered. 'I'm sure it must,' he said. 'Now we don't want that to happen to me, do we? That's why we've got to get the length of the drop right.'

'Oh, it wouldn't happen to you,' Els assured him. 'The old warder says it's the other way round with you. He says your head would…'

The Bishop didn't want to know what the old warder had said. He had had enough of his morbid interest in anatomy already.

'Look, if you're really so keen to get a permanent job as a hangman, you'll have to make a success of this execution. Nobody is going to employ you if you don't make a go of your first hanging.'

Els looked pathetically at the Bishop. 'I know that,' he said, 'but what can I do if your weight isn't in the handbook?'

'You could make me lighter,' the Bishop suggested looking at his manacles and chains.

'Done,' said Els delighted. 'I'll have you put on a nil diet at once.'

'I didn't mean that,' said the Bishop who couldn't imagine anything niller than the diet he was already on. 'What I had in mind was taking all these chains off and weighing me without them. I think you might find me a lot lighter.'

'I doubt if I'd find you at all,' said Els.

'Well, if you won't take these chains off I don't see how I can help you,' said the Bishop wearily.

'If I were to take them off, I'm damned sure you would not help me either,' said Els.

'In that case I don't know what to suggest. You're not going to find my proper weight with the chains on and if you won't take them off…' He paused as he remembered another scene in the chapel window. 'You don't surely intend to hang me in chains?' he asked.

'No,' said Els, 'there's a special set of leather straps and a cloth bag for your head.'

'Dear God what a way to go,' murmured the Bishop.

'I've put boot polish on the straps and shone them up. They look quite smart,' Els went on. The Bishop wasn't listening to him. He had suddenly thought of a way round the problem of weight.

'I know what we can do,' he said. 'You go and get another set of chains and manacles and bring them here, and we'll weigh them by themselves.'

'I don't see how that's going to help,' said Els. 'I've just told you we won't be using chains on the day. You don't think I've been polishing those straps for nothing, do you?'

The Bishop was beginning to think that he would never be able to get Els to understand anything.

'Once we know how much the chains weigh by themselves we can subtract their weight from three hundred and ninety-eight pounds and then we'll know how much I weigh by myself.'

Els considered the proposal for a moment, but in the end he shook his head.

'It wouldn't work,' he said.

'Why on earth not?'

'I could never do subtraction at school,' Els confessed finally.

'Never mind,' said the Bishop. 'I was very good at it and I'll do the sum myself.'

'How do I know you won't cheat?'

'My dear Hangman Els,' said the Bishop. 'I can think of two good reasons why I am as anxious as you are that this hanging should go with a swing. Possibly three. One is that if you make the drop too short, I shall strangle to death and I really don't want to. Two is that if you make it too long you'll probably decapitate me.'

'I won't,' said Els. 'Your head will come off.'

'Quite,' said the Bishop hurriedly. 'Nothing like calling a spade a bloody shovel, is there?'

'What's three?' asked Els, who didn't care what a bloody shovel was called.

'Oh yes, three. I had almost forgotten three. Well three is that you are obviously a born executioner and while you've got a lot to learn about hanging, I like to see a man make use of the gifts he's been given. Yes, I know about the cloth bag,' the Bishop continued, as Els tried to interrupt with the news that he wouldn't see anything on the scaffold, 'but I am speaking metaphorically, and speaking metaphorically I hope you'll go on to greater things, one might almost say to the top of your profession.'

'You really think I'll make a good hangman?' Els asked eagerly.

'I'm sure of it,' said the Bishop. 'I can feel it in my bones that you will make a name for yourself among executioners the world over,' and having given the hangman the reassurance Els so desperately needed the Bishop went back to his cell while Els went off to fetch another set of chains and manacles. In the end they discovered that Jonathan Hazelstone weighed one hundred and eighty pounds and needed a seven-foot drop.

If the Bishop was having difficulty persuading Els to kill him properly, Kommandant van Heerden was finding it almost as difficult to persuade the surgeons at Piemburg Hospital to undertake the operation he needed to save his life. They seemed to insist on raising quite irrelevant objections, and the Kommandant found particularly irritating their insistence that there was nothing wrong with his heart. When he had disposed of that difficulty by threatening to charge them with attempted murder if they didn't agree with his diagnosis, they spent another hour discussing the ethical problems involved in transferring the heart of a murderer into the body of a man, who, as they pointed out, was so manifestly non-homicidal. The Kommandant soon set their minds at rest on that score, and it was only when they raised the technical problems of tissue typing and rejection and tried to explain how unlikely it was that the condemned man's tissues would match those of a purebred Afrikaaner, like Kommandant van Heerden, that he lost his temper.

'Are you telling me that I'm not a human being?' the Kommandant yelled at Dr Erasmus who led the transplant team. 'Are you telling me I'm a bloody baboon?'

'I'm not saying anything of the sort,' Dr Erasmus protested. 'You don't seem to understand. Each human being has a different type of tissue and yours may not be the same type as that of the donor.'

'You're telling me I've got coloured blood in me,' the Kommandant yelled. 'You're saying I can't have an Englishman's heart because I'm part-kaffir. Is that what you're saying?'

'I'm not saying anything of the sort. There's no reason at all why you shouldn't have a kaffir's heart,' Dr Erasmus said desperately. He found Kommandant van Heerden's violence positively unnerving.

'There you are. You said it. You said I could have a kaffir's heart,' shouted the Kommandant.

'I didn't mean that you had to have one. There's no reason why a black man's heart should not be put into a white man's body any more than there is any reason why a white man's organs shouldn't be transferred to a black man.'

Kommandant van Heerden had never heard such a flagrant violation of the basic concepts of apartheid in his life.

'There's every bloody reason,' he shouted, 'why a white man's organs shouldn't be put into a black man. No white man is allowed to put any portion of his body into a black man. It's against the fucking law.'

Dr Erasmus had never heard of the Fucking Law but he assumed it was police slang for the Immorality Act.

'You misunderstand me,' he said. 'I wasn't referring to sexual organs.'

'There you go again,' bellowed the Kommandant. 'I'll charge you with incitement to inter-racial homosexuality if you don't shut up.'

Dr Erasmus was silenced.

'Calm yourself, Kommandant,' he said soothingly. 'For goodness sake calm yourself. You'll do yourself an injury carrying on like this.'

'I'll do you an injury, you bastard,' yelled the Kommandant who wasn't going to be ordered about by any pig of a doctor who told him he had coloured blood. 'I know your sort. You're an enemy of South Africa, that's what you are. You're a bloody Communist. I'll have you in under the Terrorist Act and we'll soon see how you like organ transplants.'