Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (39 page)

The choices, of course, become progressively trickier, particularly if you have selected correctly from
(a) Walked
under a bus, (b) Martian fell on him, (c) Got murdered by someone
pouring poison in his ear
, because you have now qualified to enter Part Two of the game, which concerns what Hamlet is going to do about it. If, for example, you select
(b) Put on
a cape and run Claudius over in the Batmobile
, you will have to start again from the beginning, whereas should you choose correctly, you will arrive at the interesting teaser that neither you nor Hamlet knows what he is going to do about it, at which point the little Lego-like figure in the black outfit will ask you what you would do in his position, thus moving the game into its interactive phase, where you will be able to do anything you want, provided, of course, that everybody ends up exploding, as Shakespeare intended.

This, then, is what I am offering to HRH. He can only say ‘I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers', but he is a sensitive cove, he surely wouldn't want to see a Prince of Wales make the same mistake twice.

63
Doom'd For a Certain Term to
Walk the Night

The woman at the all-night unisex sauna in East Finchley was really very nice. Heart of gold. ‘Yes,' she said, ‘there
used
to be an all-night chemist in this parade, but it shuts at nine o'clock now.'

I liked ‘parade'. I hadn't heard the word in a long time. It took me back. There were a lot of parades about when I was young. There were also a lot of all-night chemists.

‘Sorry to barge in on you,' I said, ‘it's just that your light was on. I drove down here because Golders Green police station said they thought there was an all-night chemist, but I couldn't see anywhere else open.'

‘There's only us and the Iranian grocer,' said the sauneuse. ‘Funny they didn't direct you to Warman-Freed in Golders Green Road. I think they're open all night. Shall I look up their number?'

‘That's all right, thanks,' I said, ‘I know where you mean.'

It was two a.m. when I got to Warman-Freed. It was closed.

‘Shuts at midnight,' said the man in the all-night pizza parlour opposite. He was very nice, too. He turned from the coffee machine and said, loudly: ‘Anyone knows where there's an all-night chemist?'

The half-dozen customers glanced up from their iridescent wedges. Five shook their heads, but a man in a herringbone overcoat said: ‘You want bliss.'

Who, I thought, doesn't? Since, however, I also wanted the bottle of Distalgesic and the course of Amoxyl for which their prescription and I had been trawling the streets since half-past twelve, I took the chance that the herringbone overcoat housed more than a peckish evangelist doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, and repeated: ‘Bliss?'

‘All-night chemist, corner of Walm Lane and Kilburn High Road.'

I stood looking at the dark windows of Bliss for a bit, until the man from the all-night minicabbery across the road strolled over and said, ‘All night?
All night?
They haven't been open all night for what, got to be three years, could be four, we've been here, what . . . ?'

So I asked him, because it was the sort of thing a mini-cabbie ought to know, and he said: ‘No problem, John Bell & Croyden, get anything there, any time, Wigmore Street, on the left, just past that wossname, that all-night video place, what's it called, it'll come to me in a minute . . .'

It took me twenty, and I came to it because when I came to John Bell & Croyden, though the outside lamplight winked cheerily off scalpel sets and sphygmomanometers and stethoscopes and curious prostheses and tiny aluminium baths for this unfathomable purpose and that, no light at all shone from within.

‘You're going back a bit,' said the proprietor of 24-Hour Video Rental. ‘They stopped their all-night service donkey's years ago.'

‘Only place I know,' said a customer, piling four dubious cassettes beside the till, ‘is Boots at Piccadilly Circus.'

‘He probably meant Boots at Marble Arch,' said the man behind the till at the all-night souvenir shop opposite Boots at Piccadilly Circus, where two young Japanese were trying on policemen's helmets, but if he did, he was wrong there, too, as anyone who has stood outside the Boots at Marble Arch at 3.30 a.m. will tell you.

So I went into an all-night coffee shop at the top of Edgware Road, and I had a large espresso, and I asked them if I could use their phone, and I rang the Royal Free Hospital because it was on what was going to be my way home, now, and I told them about how I had this prescription for my daughter who had this extremely painful ear infection, and could they possibly supply the medication, and they said not unless I brought the ear in and they diagnosed it first, and I said that was impossible but was there an all-night chemist's anywhere between Land's End and John O'Groats, and they said not that they knew of.

So I came home, and my wife said it was okay. Victoria was asleep now and it could wait till morning, and I pointed out that it
was
bloody morning, and I was going upstairs to write this piece about the greatest metropolis in the world and how you could get everything you wanted any hour of the day or night, saunas, pizzas, videos, minicabs, policemen's helmets, you name it – remember how it was when you were a kid, you couldn't get anything after midnight, except medicine.

64
Garden Pests

We physicists know a thing or two about the relationship between heat and friction. The thing I know is that there is a relationship. Had I not given up physics at 14, I should probably have found out what the other thing was, but there you are, you cannot be everywhere at once.

Anyhow, if God had wanted us to know everything, he would not have given us the British educational system. Free will is the Almighty's way, and who am I to argue with that? Especially since I gave up divinity the same term. Offered the choices, I shrewdly guessed that my life would be better served by an ability to decline
amo
and list the principal exports of the Gold Coast, and I have not been proved wrong.

This does not prevent me from taking as today's text the observation that heat produces friction. I have of course heard that there is a body of opinion which holds the opposite view, but that is no more than you would expect from mere theorists. They ought to get out and about a bit. And what they ought to get out and about to is more lunchtime drinks parties, now that the ozone has, as I understand it, gone through the greenhouse layer, and there's more to come, say the weathermen.

For we have suddenly become a race which drinks
al fresco
. We have people over at noon, and we usher them towards lawn and flagstone, and we fill their right hands, and they amble about among shrub and tub, and the sun thrums down upon them, and they chat and chortle happily enough, and all is more or less as it was in the blissful days before it was 82º and still rising. And then the friction enters the soul.

Do not get ahead of me: I am not about to address that homicidal irritability which comes to lesser breeds when the mercury goes up. These are civilized folk of whom I speak – should the sun-kissed talk turn to, say, Heseltine or Latvia or the Booker Prize, they do not take swings at one another, they do not fumble beneath the sweated seersucker for Colt and life-preserver, they do not roll amid the petunias, their hands locked around one another's throats.

All that happens when the hot weather strikes is that they say things outside which they would never dream of saying inside. The only part, indeed, which the heat plays is to put them where they can do the saying. In the old, cold days of yore, you had people over for summer drinks, and they stared out at the drizzle for a bit, and then they got on with the sluicing and the small talk. What they never, ever, did was criticize their surroundings. They did not say: ‘Did you realize your carpet has got moth?' Or: ‘I know a bit about furniture, and that chiffonier is unquestionably fake.' Or: ‘It's time you had that rising damp seen to.' Or: ‘I've sat on a few uncomfortable sofas in my time, but this one takes the bloody biscuit!'

So why should it be that the simple act of shepherding them out into the sunshine should have the effect of stripping from them all pretence of civility? Why, as you are topping up his glass, should a guest nod downward towards his feet and observe: ‘Yes, well, you realize of course that the only way to get rid of all this couch-grass is to dig the whole thing up and start again?', the man on his right chuckle and say: ‘Never mind couch-grass, as far as I am aware couch-grass doesn't fall on you, have you taken a look at that chimney of his, I give it six months, tops' and the man on his left chip in with ‘Yes, I noticed the chimney when I was looking at his guttering, you ought to have that guttering seen to, half the brackets have rusted off '?

Why do their wives then join you so that one can point out that if you don't do something about the leaf-curl on your eucryphia it'll be dead by tea-time, and another shriek ‘First things first, have you seen the thrips on his gladdies, you'd think he'd never heard of Malathion!' while the third inquires icily whether you have something to bang her heel back on with, and her husband smirks and says, ‘I warned you about that path of his, didn't I?'

Forgive me, I only observe this, I cannot explain it. To me, psychology is an even more closed book than physics.

65
Time for a Quick One?

H
ere's something you didn't know. Georges Simenon never had woodworm. The great Walloon was never infested. Do you still maintain that this little corner shop of mine trades only in frivolities?

Were I further to point out not only that his waste-disposal never had a spoon down it, but also that he knew a Chubb 3R35 deadlock nightlatch when he saw one, this would probably be too much hard fact for you to absorb all at once, you would almost certainly have to go and lie down, so I shall hold back for a bit. But be warned: the big stuff is on the way. When it comes to critical theory, I do not spar. I can go 15 rounds with the best.

Interim, the scene now shifts to Monday morning, to find me curled up with Patrick Marnham's new biography,
The
Man Who Wasn't Maigret: A Portrait of Georges Simenon
. I read a lot of literary biography, you have to if you aspire to be a novelist, it is the best way of discovering what you need to do in order to write the sort of books you wish to emulate. I first committed myself to this 35 years ago, when I read William Faulkner (people did, then), only to discover that he had jotted his early masterpieces while working as a trawlerman, coal-heaver, oil-rigger, steeplejack and various other callings not readily on tap in the London suburbs, even if you could have fitted the Archangel run and refurbishing Salisbury spire into the A-level timetable, so I gave up on being Faulkner and went on to being Hemingway, until I found out that I would have to run through Pamplona doing the thing with the bulls that can give you a wound down there, so then I moved on to being Scott Fitzgerald, because all you had to do was drink, but it did not help me to write
Gatsby
, it just helped me to walk into the furniture, and that is pretty much the way things went with my fictional ambitions over the next three decades, you would be amazed what novelists have to go through, need I remind you that Trollope had to invent the pillarbox in order to fire up his muse?

But then came Monday. I had always admired Simenon – a hundred novels was it? – but I had never known how he had managed it until I read Marnham's book and discovered that Simenon had bedded 10,000 women, even though his wife claimed it was only 1,200 (did they sit down nightly with ready-reckoners and compare lists, did she cry, ‘I see where you've gone wrong, Georges, you've got that big Irish readhead down twice'?), but it was still enough to get the novels going, and I thought to myself, that's not so difficult, I could do that, especially when I discovered that Georges would often knock off four women in the same afternoon by going up to them in the street, palpating their breasts, and then finding a doorway, it couldn't take that long, you would be back at the typewriter by teatime.

So I put down the book and I ran upstairs to choose a seductive tie, and I splashed on this terrific aftershave I have, and I was just going through the front door when Mr Elias came out of the kitchen I may have told you we are having rebuilt, and he said look at this, and it was a floorboard with a million titchy holes in, and I said what is it, and he said it is woodworm, you are infested, you will have to get Rentokil over, so I had to fix that up and wait in for on-site inspection and early estimate when I could have been out palpating, and that was Monday shot, but I made an early start on Tuesday and nearly got to the garage before Mr Elias caught up and said he could fit the new side door if I went down to Danico and got him a Chubb 3R35 deadlock nightlatch, so I drove to Swiss Cottage and I passed some really fantastic-looking women on the way, many of them conveniently near doorways, but when I got home again Mr Elias said that is the wrong lock, so I drove back to Danico, and I exchanged locks, by which time it was noon, but there was still half a day until Mr Elias said there was a spoon stuck down the waste disposal, and I said can't you do it, and he said do you want this new door in or not, and by the time I had dismantled the waste disposal it was half past two, and I had to write this piece for
The Times
, without even one palpation to inspire me.

Which is how I know that Simenon never had woodworm.

66
The Leaving of Cricklewood

F
orgive me. I hate to be the bearer of double whammies but I have, this morning, no option: all I can pray is that you will somehow find the fortitude to bear what I bear to you. Provided, of course, that the first whammy has not already left you supine in some darkened room, gaunt and listless beneath your saline drip and waiting for a council carer to come in and massage your feet; in which event, you must not read one further word of this.