Sprout Mask Replica (11 page)

‘How
long have you been a private detective?’

‘About
twenty minutes. Why do you ask?’

‘What
did you do before that?’

‘Nothing
much. Dossed about. Tried to get into art school. Thought about joining the
space programme. Fancied being a rock star for a while, and a gardener. Thought
about combining the two, couldn’t quite make them gel together though.’

‘You’ve
always been a bit of a loner.’

‘One
bit in particular.’

‘And do
private eyes get the girls?’

‘The
ones I read about do. Hey, what is all this? I’m supposed to be asking the
questions. What are we doing out here anyway?’

‘Remember
the matchsticks and the Sellotape?’

‘The
what?
No.’

‘Why
were they stuck to your forehead?’

‘An
aircraft over the Andes. It
had
to crash, I couldn’t compensate for
that.
If the guns had got through to the rebels, the government would have been
overthrown. The matches were a mistake so they had to come off, I had no
control over the situation. I never do.’

‘Interesting.’

‘What
is interesting?’

‘Go on
about having no control over the situation.’

‘You
know all the stuff that’s been written about chaos theory and this holistic
overview of the ecology. That everything is interlinked. Everything. A
butterfly flutters its wings in the Amazon basin and ultimately the price of
beef goes up in New Zealand.

Well,
it’s partially true, but not quite. You see there never can be an imbalance in
nature, because nature is not static. Nature is always moving forward, always
evolving, developing, never still. It’s harmonious. Except sometimes it’s not
completely harmonious. And that’s where I come in. I compensate for partial
imbalance, partial lack of harmony. It’s a reverse of the butterfly. I balance
the big events. The other way round, you see. I compensate for this year’s red
fashions by swallowing cigarette ash. Don’t ask me how it works and why I’m the
one who has to do it. I don’t know.’

‘That
was quite a speech.’

‘What
was?’

‘Go on
with what you were saying.’

‘I’m
not the first and I won’t be the last. There’s others like me, loners who can’t
fit in. You might see them in rags sleeping in doorways, muttering to
themselves. They’re compensators too, maintaining the balance of equipoise,
helping things along. It might be in how they mumble, or the way they let their
hair grow, or the number of holes in their shoes. The world wouldn’t function
without them, but the world doesn’t even know the debt it owes them.’

‘I
know,’ said Colon. ‘At the moment of my implosion, I saw it all.’

‘Saw
what
all?’

‘You
can only answer every second question, I see that. But weren’t you ever aware
of what you were doing?’

‘It’s
something I’ve done all my life. It came naturally. I’ve never given it any
thought at all.’

‘But
what—’ He paused.

‘What?’

‘What
if it worked the other way round? What if you could reverse the process? Be the
mythical butterfly? Put two fountain pens in your top pocket and make next year’s
fashion green?’

‘A man
who could do that,’ I said, ‘would have the world to play with. Such a man
would be as God.’

‘God,
or something else.’

‘What
did you say?’

‘It
doesn’t matter. I have said enough. Continue with your good work. But lay off
the Sellotape. Keep it low profile. Do it in the comfort of your own bedroom.
Will you do that for me?’

‘Yes I
will.’

‘And
what
will you do for me?’

I
scratched my head. ‘I don’t know. What are you talking about?’ He smiled that
smile again. ‘Absolutely nothing. I’m sorry that I bothered you. Enjoy your
evening. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

I stood
there in the alleyway and watched him walk away. Something very odd had just
occurred and I meant to find out just what it was.

I
reached into the inner pocket of my jacket, oblivious to the fact that it
contained three fir cones painted silver and a cork which had compensated for
the new train time tables and fished out my private eye tape recorder.

I’d set
it recording back in the Gents and was eager to hear just what was
really
on
it.

In my
business, tape-recording your conversations can sometimes mean the difference
between a revelation and a
REVELATION.

This
was one of those sometimes.

HOTEL
JERICHO

The last time I saw Sparrow

He was leaning on his barrow

Where he sold the spud and marrow

And the sprout of ill repute.

He was tall and tanned and well advised,

His ego too was over-sized,

And I looked on in wonder

At the brightness of his suit.

For he would swagger to and fro

En route to Hotel Jericho.

The last time I saw Norman

He was working as a storeman

And a part-time western law man

Of the Wyatt Earp brigade.

He was dressed in rags and tatters,

Versed in all the legal matters,

And the natives came to watch him

As he strolled the esplanade.

For thus he strolled, both thus and so

En route to Hotel Jericho.

The last time I saw Wheeler

He was training as a Peeler

And making quite a mealer (meal of)

Doing press-ups for the boys.

They were standing round in motley knots,

Like leopards who were changing spots,

You couldn’t see or hear or think because of all the
noise.

The blighters come, the blighters go

En route to Hotel Jericho.

The last time I, well, never mind

I’m leaving all those lads behind

They really are the common kind

And quite below my style.

I’m selling up my stocks and shares,

The dogs I’ve trained for baiting bears,

My bingo halls and wax museums on the Golden Mile.

It’s hi de hi and ho de ho

I’m
buying Hotel Jericho.

5

IN HOTEL JERICHO THE BEDS
ARE NEVER CHANGED, THE WINDOWS
never opened. Flies
circle the naked light bulbs, static crackles on the broken TV screens. The
taps all drip and the plugs all leak and the people all smell bad.

Someone’s
crying in the basement, someone’s lying in the hail. No-one notices as I glide
by, nobody at all.

I speak
to no-one now. I dare not speak. Words have power and power corrupts. I spend
all the time I can in my room. I only shop at night and I’m very careful what I
buy. I have to keep the balance right. Too much salt and there might be another
war. Too little sugar and who knows what might happen? I know, so I always take
three in my coffee. No milk though, that might be dangerous.

I write
only on lined paper in red exercise books. Thirty lines to the page, twenty
pages to the book. I count the number of words on each page very carefully. The
number of mis-spellings. The number of letters to each word, where to put the
punctuation marks. If I’m wrong by a comma the results could be catastrophic.

I work
very
slowly. Very is in italics. I have to be
very
careful about italics.

I’m
remembering back again now. Back to how it started. Back to when I became
aware. The
REVELATION.

So long
ago.

I
walked home from Fangio’s Bar that night. I didn’t take the free bus. It was a
long walk home, but it seemed the thing to do at the time. I walked on the
pavement cracks to compensate for the new trees they’d planted in the park and
went part of the way barefoot because Sonic Energy Authority were at number one
for the third consecutive week.

Of
course I didn’t know I was doing it.

Not
then.

But
later. Later I would. Oh my word, yes.

I
entered our house through the unlocked front door. No-one ever locked their
doors in those days, not in our neighbourhood. It wasn’t that people were more
honest back then, it’s just that no-one had anything worth nicking.

Muffled
screams issued from the kitchen. Mum was ironing Dad’s shirt again. Since Dad
had pawned the ironing-board, clothes had to be ironed while still on the body.
It was a messy business, but wasn’t everything?

I
wandered into the front parlour. Brother Andy sat in the armchair with a
strained expression on his face. He was trying very hard to grow a moustache.

‘How’s
it coming, Great One?’ I asked.

‘I had
half a Zappata an hour ago, but it’s gone back in again.’

I
seated myself on the Persian pouffe, a present from Uncle Brian. ‘Tell me,’ I
said, ‘do I look strange to you?’

‘No, I
recognized you at once.

‘Nothing
odd about me, you would say?’

‘Have
you grown a moustache?’

I felt
my upper-lip area. ‘No,’ I said.

‘Well,
don’t interrupt me when I’m trying to.’

I left
him to his concentration and went up to my room.

I
occupied the loft at this time. Once I had a bedroom of my own, next to my
brother’s. But I came home from school one day to find all my things in the
loft and his room knocked through into mine.

After
several months I plucked up enough courage to ask him why I had been moved into
the loft.

‘Why
have I been moved into the loft, Great One?’ I asked him.

‘To
keep the tigers away. ‘But there are no tigers round here.’ ‘There. So it
works, doesn’t it?’ And that was that.

My
brother had converted the loft. To Islam. It had been a simple ceremony, but
moving. At the end of it he charged me a pound and informed me that I now had
the power to issue fatwas, but only small ones and only against domestic
animals. I looked up the
word fatwa
in the dictionary. It wasn’t there.
The nearest to it was
fatuous,
which meant complacently or inanely
stupid.

This
bothered me.

Up in
the loft I lit a candle and sat down upon my lilo. I took out the tape recorder
from my pocket and gave it a thoughtful looking-over. There was something
important on the tape, I just knew it. But it bothered me. Something deep
inside was saying, ‘Don’t play it, don’t play it.’ Something even deeper was
saying, ‘Go on, you have to.’ And something even deeper made a rude noise come
out of my bottom.

I
watched the candle flame turn green. An omen? It had to be. I rewound the tape
and pressed the play button.

And
nothing whatever came out.

So that
was that.

Oh no
it wasn’t. I had the pause button on.

I
pressed upon the pause button and listened in awe to the conversation I’d had
with Mr Colon in the alleyway.

The
whole bit.

It was
crazy stuff. The craziest. The message written in the stars. The butterfly’s
wings. The compensating. And finally the line that sent shivers down my spine. ‘A
man who could do that,’ I had said, ‘would have the world to play with. Such a
man would be as God.’

I rewound the tape and
played it again. And again and again and again until the batteries ran out.
Then I pulled off the full spool and hid it away behind the water-tank. A
chapter of my life was over.

A very short
one, as it happened.

But
there were further chapters yet to come and these, I felt certain, would be
gloriously long.

CAPTAIN
OF THE HEAD

I’ve a way with the old Rosie Lee

That keeps all the sailors amused,

When they come home on leave

I’ve some tricks up my sleeve

To impress all the salts when they’re used.

I do speeches from most of the classics