Sprout Mask Replica (20 page)

‘Fifteen.’

‘Then
you’re much too young for me.

‘Now
cut that out.’

‘All
right,’ she said. ‘All right. I can’t go to bed with you. You might lose your
powers.’

‘I’m
sure I’d be good for an hour or two.’

‘I mean
your
mystical
powers.

‘Oh
those.
I’ve frankly lost all interest in those as it happens. Let’s go upstairs.’
I didn’t like to beg, begging is so undignified. ‘Please,’ I wailed, falling to
my knees. ‘Please. I’ll do anything you want.’

‘We
mustn’t,’ she said. ‘You are the Chosen One. I’m not worthy.’

‘Pay
the bill,’ I told her. ‘We’re going upstairs.’ And she paid the bill and we
went.

We went up to her room
rather than mine. When we got inside I found out why. Hers was somewhat bigger
and grander. I put this down, of course, to the luck of the draw. After all,
what else could it be?

She
went off to the en-suite bathroom to do whatever it is that women do prior to
making love.

‘Sit
down on the bed,’ she said. ‘Watch TV for a few minutes, I won’t be long.’

I sat
down on the bed and tinkered with the controller. I don’t watch a lot of TV
myself. Used to, all the time, but something had happened a few months before
to a friend of mine which changed all that for me.

His
name was Ray Bland, but we used to call him ‘Cathode’ Ray. Well, we had to call
him something and Ray didn’t mind, because he felt that it gave him an air of
individuality. Of course
it did nothing of the kind,
because we were only taking the piss. But Ray didn’t mind that either, because
he felt that we did it out of grudging respect.

This
too, of course was a fallacy, but Ray didn’t mind about that either. In fact,
Ray didn’t mind about anything much and this was the one thing we liked him
for.

‘Human
nature is as inexplicable in its many-sidedness as the Sunday Football League,’
Ray once told Jim Pooley. And Jim felt that this was probably the case.

Ray’s
life was divided, far from fairly in his opinion, between working at the Blue
Bird dry-cleaners (at that time still a wet-cleaners), and watching television.

‘In the
future,’ Ray declared, ‘nano-technology, allied to genetic engineering, will
create a classless, workless society, which will be dedicated entirely to
ceaseless sensory stimulation. In the meantime, however, we must make the most
of what we have, to wit, television. Whenever possible we should sate our
senses at the screen.

Sating
his sense at the screen was indeed an obsession for Ray. It was indeed an
addiction.

‘I have
seen
High Noon
twenty-three times,’ he told Pooley, upon one of his rare
nights out away from the screen. And then proceeded to date each separate
occasion.

‘That “Cathode”
Ray is a dull one, to be sure,’ Jim told Neville. ‘Although he doesn’t
mind.’

‘And
lastly, 16th August 1965,’ said Ray who was not to be interrupted during the
disclosure of such important information.

‘Sing
us some of your 1950s TV commercials, Ray,’ said Old Pete, seating himself down
at The Swan’s elderly piano.

Pooley
drank up and left, he had heard the spirited renditions of
Rael Brook
Poplin, the shirts you don’t iron,
and
Shippams for tea, for tea, for
tea
(performed to the tune of
The Blue Danube)
all too many times.

‘OK,’
said Ray. ‘As you’re asking.’

Pooley
lurched drunkenly out into a windswept Ealing Road.

From
the saloon bar of The Flying Swan, the haunting strains of
Keep going well,
Keep going Shell, You can be sure of Shell, Shell, Shell,
sung in a most
unconvincing Bing Crosby voice, drifted after him.

‘Boring
little tick,’ muttered Pooley.

‘The
Esso sign means happy motoring,’
crooned ‘Cathode’
Ray Bland. ‘Why doesn’t he just bugger off and sate his sodding senses?’
complained an old soldier, who had seen it all before and heard quite enough.

The television detector
van, disguised this week as one of Lorenzo’s Ice-Cream wagons (but to the
trained eye an obvious fraud, as the ice-cream selections were spelt
correctly), swung into Mafeking Avenue pursued by the inebriated Pooley
shouting, ‘Just one damn choc ice, that’s all that I want.’

The
driver, Aaron Lemon,
[22]
who, in his mother’s opinion, had the hands of a concert pianist, stood heavily
upon the brake. ‘We’ll pull up here, I think,’ he said.

The
dull thud as Pooley’s head struck the van’s rear door was hardly audible
within.

‘Switch
her on, Mickey,’ said Aaron.

Mickey Vez
[23]
, who, in his mother’s opinion,
had the legs of an African tribal warrior, threw the switch and the dazzling
rocket that masked the antennae atop the van began to rotate.

‘It’s a
little like being at mission control,’ observed the romantic Mickey.

Aaron
eyed the screen, ‘A little,’ he replied, ‘but not a lot.’

Without
any warning at all, because it was quite unexpected, the little screen lit up
like a piper at the gates of dawn (?). Well, very brightly, anyway!

‘Great
steaming bowls of sprouts,’ cried Mickey, whose mother had taught him not to
swear. ‘What is it? A nuclear war?’

‘It
could be an electrical storm or something. Turn it down, it’s blinding me.

Mickey
adjusted the brightness control. ‘It’s coming from over there,’ he said,
consulting his Captain Laser wrist compass and pointing towards the east.

He
checked a map and sinister government-issue directory. ‘Number twenty-three
Sprite Street. Name of Mr Raymond Bland.’ And then his face lit up to match the
screen. ‘Eureka,’ said Mickey. ‘No TV licence.’

Below
the van a prone and muddy figure with a bruised forehead mumbled, ‘One bloody
choc ice, is that so much to ask?’

‘Cathode’
Ray was back at home. He sat before, or more accurately within, his pride and
joy and glory. Wall-to-wall-to-wall-to-wall television. From his swivel chair
in the centre of his front parlour he could sate his senses on the screens of
some four hundred televisions lining the four walls (one hundred to a wall).

‘It is
the dream of a lifetime realized,’ said Ray, who, in his mother’s opinion, had
the eyes of Bette Davis.

Ray had
arranged four video cameras, one high upon each wall and angled down towards
his chair. The four top rows of televisions
[24]
were connected to these and by swivelling the chair, Ray could see himself
continuously, whilst keeping an eye on the lower screens, each of which was
tuned to an ordinary channel, controlled by a master unit strapped to the arm
of his chair.

The
floor was a snake-house of cables, and aerial leads ran up to the hole drilled
in the centre of the ceiling, giving the room something of the appearance of a
circus tent interior. In Ray’s back garden an eighty-foot ‘commandeered’
electricity board pylon served as the very acme of aerials.

It was
all
very
exciting.

And
very
illegal.

‘Good
evening and welcome to
World of the Weird,’
said the three hundred and
sixty faces of Jack Black, a popular TV presenter of the day, who, in his
mother’s opinion, had the hair of the dog that bit him.

The ten
left ears, ten right ears, ten faces and ten backs of heads of ‘Cathode’ Ray
Bland looked on appreciatively.

‘Lovely,’
said the ten mouths. The other bits remained silent. Aaron Lemon knocked upon
the front door.

‘Tonight,’
said the faces of Jack, ‘we visit a man in Norfolk who claims that he can
hypnotize fruit and veg in order to increase yield. Discover just why the
planet Jupiter got so very fat. Pose the question, order out of chaos, God’s
will or just a passing fad? And learn the terrible truth about the Scandinavian
garden gnome trade.’

‘Jolly
good show,’ said the ten mouths of Bland.

Aaron
Lemon put an authorized shoulder to the front door. ‘Come on, Mickey,’ he said,
‘this is THE BIG ONE.’

On
three hundred and sixty screens a small man in a turban stood in a sprout field
shouting, ‘Grow, you buggers, grow,’ as Aaron Lemon with the pianist’s hands
and Mickey Vez with the legs (of the tribesman, not the piano player), burst
into Ray’s front parlour and came to a staggering, stumbling stop.

Mickey
struggled for breath and was the first to find his voice. ‘F***ing H*ll!’ he
went, remembering his mother.

Ten TV
screens behind him showed sweat breaking out on his forehead.

‘Big,
big, big one,’ mumbled Aaron, ‘big, big.., big… one,’ as to right and left of
him his ears looked on in batches of ten.

‘What
is the meaning of
this?’
roared the ten mouths of Bland. And as he
struggled to his feet his waistcoat, high on the TV screens, ruffled
magnificently. ‘Get out of here
at once!’

‘You…
you…’ Aaron’s jaw rattled up and down. Never in his long and celebrated
career as a TV detector man had he ever seen anything to parallel this. ‘You..,
you… I…’

‘We’ll
all be in
The News of the World,’
gasped Mickey. ‘I never knew I had a
mole behind my left ear,’ he continued, looking up at the screens.

Ray’s
hands began to flap about. Jack Black’s three hundred and sixty faces were
saying ‘petrified dwarves.

‘Get
out of my sanctum,’ screamed ‘Cathode’ Ray. ‘Get out of here, idolaters!’

‘I want
my mum,’ blubbered Aaron, assuming the foetal position, thumb thrust firmly
into gob.

‘I could
have that removed by surgery,’ said Mickey examining his on-screens mole.

And
then suddenly a darkness entered the room.

And
with it came the reek of Brimstone.

And
with it the Angel of Death.

The
Angel of Death was dark and foully bespattered. He raised a terrible fist that
clutched a terrible paling torn from the front fence outside.

‘Give
me a bloody choc ice or
die!’
he roared.

Now, reports vary in
regard to
exactly
what happened next. The explosion was heard five miles
away, registered on the seismograph at Greenwich and scored a chart position on
the Richter scale.

‘Cathode’
Ray was out of town for a long while and when he returned he was bearded, wore
the habit of a monk and referred to himself as ‘Brother Raymond’.

Jim Pooley
declines to talk of the incident. But I have seen him hurriedly crossing the
high Street before he reaches the television repair shop. And the very mention
of the words ‘choc ice’ is sufficient to send him ducking beneath the nearest
table with his hands clasped over his ears.

I lay upon Litany’s bed
smoking a Senior Service and sucking a Fisherman’s Friend. ‘That was wonderful,’
I told her.

‘What,
the short story?’

‘No,
the love-making. It was my first time, I will remember it for ever.’

‘Well,
you didn’t do too bad for a kid of fifteen, apart from when I was up on your
shoulders and you—’

I put a
finger on her lips, ‘That’s
our
secret. I think I successfully
distracted the readers’ attention by slipping in the short story, what do you
reckon?’

Litany
smiled. ‘What, as a substitute for a graphic description of two hours’ horny
love-making? Oh yeah, I should think so.’

And
then she smiled again and I didn’t mind at all.

TIM
DERBY’S MATCHBOX

(A
foretaste of horrors to come)

The sad man called Derby walked out in the rain

From the peak of his hat to the soles of his feet

He was wet and he murmured again and again

It’s the curse of the matchbox I found in the street

The gay Persian matchbox I took to my flat

To add to the others I keep in my drawer

Oh who would have thought an old matchbox like that

Could cause all this sorrow and fretful furore?

The sea smote the prom and the wind howled with
vigour

And Derby returned to his garret in gloom

And he looked at the box and he knew it was bigger

It filled nearly half of his green living-room

So Derby took fright and he called for a cleric

To come and say things that a cleric must say