Sprout Mask Replica (22 page)

I was
rattled, I kid you not. And I didn’t really know quite what to say next. I
managed, ‘Why not Switzerland?’

‘They
don’t allow begging in Switzerland,’ he said and then pushed right past me and
made off along the street.

I never
saw him again after that, although I kept an eye out. My last recollection is
of him marching off around the next corner, pausing only to ask a passer-by for
money, which they pressed into his hand.

Litany returned from the
bathroom, she wore a colourful bikini top and a short skirt. ‘Go and have a
wash,’ she said. ‘Then let’s go out for a walk.’

We
strolled arm in arm along the promenade. I felt great. Although I now had
nagging doubts. Such as, what class of locomotive was Litany? Was she out for
what I could give her? I didn’t know, but I intended to watch her closely to
see what, if anything, she had in mind.

The sea
was so blue that I had to part my hair on the right-hand side and pull my jeans
pockets inside out.

‘Stop
doing that,’ said Litany. ‘Say a poem in your head or something.’

I said
a poem in my head. It was a dark one about a devil-possessed matchbox. I was
just into the last verse when this young chap in dreadlocks, studied-raggedness
and bare feet came up and asked me if I had any small change.

I gave
him a head-butt. ‘That will teach you to suck in the world’s money, you
bastard,’ I told him.

Litany
stared at me in horror.

‘Oh, I’m
terribly sorry,’ I said, helping the fellow to his feet. ‘An awful mistake, I, er,
I thought you were my brother.’

The
young man stood there looking dazed.

‘Give
him some money,’ said Litany.

‘Certainly
not, he’ll eat it.’

‘What?’

‘Oh I’m
sorry. Sorry.’ I dug into a pocket of my leather jacket and found a pound coin.
‘Sorry, friend,’ I said, handing it over. He grinned, winked and made off at
the trot as if bound upon some important mission.

‘You
shouldn’t be horrid to the homeless,’ said Litany.

‘It was
a mistake. I’m sorry.’

‘Well,
I think you should make amends.’

‘I just
did. I gave him a pound.’

‘You
should do more than that.’

‘Well,
he’s gone now, so I can’t.’

‘He
hasn’t gone.’

‘Who
he?’

‘There’s
a chap over there, sitting by the entrance to the pier. Chap with the dog. See
him?’

‘Bloke
with the dreadlocks and the big boots?’

‘That’s
the one. Give
him
something.’

‘But I
didn’t head-butt him. And I don’t have any more change.’

‘Then
this would be as good a time as any for you to use your gift.’

An
alarm bell rang in my brain. ‘Oh yes?’ I said suspiciously. ‘What do you have
in mind? Do you want me to channel some more money into your bank account so
you can write him a cheque?’

‘Of
course not, I want you to give it to him directly.’

‘Oh,’ I
said. ‘Hm, well, I don’t know.’

‘What
harm could it do? Give it a try.’

‘But I
don’t know
how
to do it, what actions to make.’

Litany
smiled that smile again. ‘I’ve been thinking about this,’ she said, ‘and I
reckon you couldn’t do it if you were thinking consciously about it. It wouldn’t
work. It has to be an unthinking, subconscious, almost reflex action. You’d
have to set yourself the task, i.e. “give this poor man lots of money”, then
clear your head of all conscious thought and let things happen naturally.’

‘Sounds
about as unlikely as anything else.’

‘But it
couldn’t hurt to give it a try.’

‘I
suppose not.’

She
kissed me on the cheek. ‘Go on, to make amends for your bad behaviour. Make me
proud of you.’

‘Proud,
eh?’

‘Proud.’
She kissed me again, on the mouth this time, a real deep lingerer.

‘Right
then,’ I said. ‘Let’s make the beggar-man a millionaire.’

And I
almost believed it myself.

I set
the thought in my head and then promptly forgot it, because another thought had
entered, this one with blond hair and no clothes on. I mentally replayed the
events of a few hours before and my hand strayed unconsciously toward my groin
and twiddled near my belt buckle.

‘Oh
look,’ said Litany. ‘Something’s happening.’

‘I’m
sorry, I can’t help it.’

‘What?’

‘What?’

‘He’s
getting up, the chap with the dog.’

And he
was, he yawned and stretched then packed up his bed roll.

‘Is he
going to get rich at once, do you think?’

As if! ‘It
doesn’t work like that,’ I told her, ‘if I can make it work at all. It’s a
chain of events, starting small then growing bigger to produce the huge event.
The money wouldn’t just drop from the sky.’

‘Shame,’
said Litany. ‘So what do you think might happen next?’

‘Well,
perhaps he’s going off now to apply for a job and he’ll be given it, be
successful at it and five years from now he’ll be rich.’

Litany
made the face that says, I don’t find that very convincing.

I just
shrugged.

The
beggar slung his bed roll across his shoulders. Stretched again and then
without any warning at all, struck down the nearest passer-by, a young man with
a briefcase, snatched the briefcase and ran off, his dog at his heels.

Litany
turned and smacked me right in the face. ‘You bastard!’ she said.
‘You
did
that.’

‘What?’

‘You
caused him to hit an innocent passer-by and steal his briefcase.’

‘I
never did.’

‘You
did it just to spite me.’

‘Spite
you?’
I shook my head, which now hurt again. I really would never understand women.
‘How do you figure
that
out?’

‘You
wanted to make a fool of me.’

‘I didn’t.
I didn’t. I just tried to help him, like you asked me. I didn’t know he’d do
that. Anyway he stole a briefcase, that’s not going to make him rich, is it?
Perhaps he’ll get arrested and serve time in prison and write a bestselling
book about his experiences. I don’t know. I did it with the best of intentions,
to bring happiness, not to harm any innocent people.’

A crowd
was already beginning to form about the young man. Litany pushed her way
through it to help him up. The young man scowled at her, thrust her aside and
stumbled off in pursuit of the thief.

‘Didn’t
need any help, eh?’ I said.

Litany
stroked the shoulder the young man had pushed and examined her fingertips. ‘He
was full of rage,’ she said. ‘But also he was full of fear. And there was
something there, something evil.’

‘You
really can sense these things, can’t you?’

‘I
always have. Ever since I was little. But there was something sinister about
that young man.’ She shuddered. ‘Something very wrong.

And
there was. Although the truth would not emerge until sometime later. I had said
that I did what I did with the best of intentions, to bring happiness, not to
harm any innocent people. Three weeks after the incident the young man’s body
was found floating in the sea. He had been cruelly tortured before having his
throat cut. The police identified him as Piers Britain, notorious child
pornographer and drug courier for the mob. The ‘word on the street’ was that he
had been carrying a briefcase containing nearly one million pounds in used
notes that was to be used for the purchase of crack-cocaine for sale to minors,
and that the money had mysteriously ‘gone astray.

The
above appeared as front page news in
The Skelington Bay Mercury.
Inside
the same issue was a much smaller item which read to the effect that the local
children’s home had been saved from closure by a gift from an anonymous
benefactor. Three-quarters of a million pounds in cash, it was. The anonymous
benefactor was described as a young man with dreadlocks and a dog.

Normally
you might have expected the children’s home article to have merited a bit more
prominence. But, as it happened, it was rather lost amongst numerous other such
articles. One about a building project to house the homeless being financed by
a similar gift, and one about a drug rehabilitation centre being financed by
another similar gift and one about the maternity hospital and the hospice and
the day-care centre and the crèche. Then there was the cats’ home and the dogs’
home and the donkey sanctuary and the wild-life park. Many, many millions of
pounds were involved, being handed out willy-nilly to the needy.

It was
as if the entire nation had woken up one morning and decided to get its
priorities right.

And
that was just how I intended it to be, but things didn’t work out as I planned.

PLEASED
AS PUNCH

I was pleased as Punch to see old Reg

The lad who sold the fruit and veg

And once gave me two tickets for the fight.

But Reg was sad, believe you me

He said he’d suffered tragedy

And he’d be glad to tell me through the night.

So I sat up with poor old Reg

Who told me that the fruit and veg

Was dropping off and trade was getting poor.

I yawned as he told tales to me

Of troubled times and poverty

And once threw up behind the kitchen door.

‘It’s very glum,’ I said at last

And thought my watch was running fast.

‘Is that the dawn that’s creeping up the sill?’

But Reg was well beyond all that

He only moaned and as we sat

I swear I heard a cock crow on the hill.

When finally he took his leave

I found it quite hard to believe

That this was Reg who used to buy me lunch.

All raggedy and bad from drink

It really, really made me think

How seeing him had made me pleased as Punch.

I’m a real fair-weather friend, me.

13

GOOD
INTENTIONS

IT WAS MY ORIGINAL
INTENTION, WHEN FIRST I SAT DOWN IN MY
room at Hotel
Jericho to pen this autobiography (thirty lines to the page, twenty pages to
the exercise book), that I might chronicle the lives of my forebears.

I
wished to write of my great grandfather, a sprout fanner and man of the cloth,
who always wore weighted boots while in the pulpit, to avoid embarrassing
levitations brought on during moments of extreme rapture.

And
flatulence.

Of my
grandfather (lay preacher, large sideburns, taste for sprouts), who spoke only
in rhyming couplets to appease the spirit of his dead wife, and who owned a
black pig named Belshazzar, that dined exclusively upon the aforementioned
vegetables and did strange things on the back parlour wall.

And of
my father (an elder in The Hermetic Order of the Golden Sprout), briefly
mentioned, who practised body-modification in an attempt to win a bet with his
brother Jack (a monk, not mentioned at all), that he could shin up the
inside
of a drainpipe.

But
alas, time and space do not allow. And when I speak of time and space, I speak
as one who knows.

Brought
up, as I was, within the sacred confines of The Brentford Triangle to such
worthy stock and raised upon a diet of sprouts and salvation, I was surely
destined to become a God-botherer, not an iconoclast.

And
such had been my intention.

When I
discovered my gift and that I was the Chosen One, my only thought was to aid
mankind. And to pull a few birds, but that’s only fair.

Things
didn’t work out on either account.

So far
I had pulled just the one bird and if she was typical of her sex, it was clear
to me that relationships with women were a tricky old business and not to be
entered into lightly.

Litany
had stormed off back to the hotel, leaving me alone at the pier feeling guilty.
There was no doubt in my mind that I
had
caused the beggar-man to thump
the fellow with the briefcase. I do not believe in the concept of
synchronicity, meaningful coincidence. Things happen
because
things
happen. Each person’s life consists of a chain of events interlinked with that
of each other person across the globe. Imagine it as a vast Chinese puzzle
which metaphysically— ‘Excuse me,’ said a small girl, tugging at my trouser
leg.