Sprout Mask Replica (25 page)

‘You
made me do that?’

‘I put
the idea into your head. I thought you could help mankind if you knew about
your gift. I thought it might earn me some big kudos with God, keep me off his
Sunday dinner plate.’

‘Well,
it’s all screwed now, I’m dead.’

‘No
hard feelings,’ said the Holy Guardian Sprout.

‘Oh,
none at all. But I do hope—’

‘What?’

‘I hope
he boils you for hours and eats you really slowly!’

‘All
right, I deserved that. But listen, we have to get you out of here.’

‘You
know any voodoo high priestesses?’

‘Not as
such. I don’t think that voodoo stuff really works. What we need is something
more radical.’

‘More
radical than voodoo?’

‘There
is one way we might do it, but it is very radical and I don’t think it’s ever
been done before.’

‘Go on.’

‘OK.
Well, everything so far has been seen from your point of view. You’re in the
first person, right? It’s your autobiography.’

‘It is,’
I said, and it was.

‘Well,
what if it ceased to be? What if you moved into the third person, became part
of someone else’s story for a while?’

‘I don’t
think that makes any sense.’

‘Oh it
does, you know. After all, you
are
dead.
You
can’t write any more
about yourself, can you? But someone could write
about you.

‘Who?’

‘I don’t
know. A biographer, perhaps.’

‘This
all sounds very iffy.’

‘More
iffy than being dead and heading for the furnace?’

‘I take
your point.’

‘Look,
just trust me on this. You have nothing to lose after all and if I can pull it
off, we’ll both be out of the hot water. Well,
I’ll
be out of the hot
water and you’ll be out of—’

‘All
right, don’t keep on about that.’

‘I’m
sorry.’

‘So
what do we do?’

‘Well,
the first thing we have to do is to get out of this chapter.’

‘I’m
very glad to hear it. But just one thing before we do.’

‘What’s
that?’

‘I don’t
know your name. What is it?’

‘It’s Bartemus,’
said the Holy Guardian Sprout. ‘But don’t be formal, chief, call me Barry.’

COLD
ROOM TILE TALK

There was more of that cold room tile talk

(Tony on the slab)

Spoke about crown folk and town folk

Travelling by cab

Saxony days by the dusty road

Bald-headed eagles on silent wings

Coffins for heroes and distant sunrises

More of that cold room tile talk

There was more of that out-and-about talk

(Tony in his towel)

Spoke of the hill folk and still folk

Monks beneath the cowl

Soft-footed beavers with ivory teeth

Wolves that bay at the hunter’s moon

Coal miners’ holidays hard and bleak

More of that out-and-about talk

There was more of that come-as-you-are talk

(Tony in the shower)

Spoke about shandys and mop-headed dandies

Living in the tower

Silver cadavers from moon-drowned lakes

Sad silent centaurs lost on moors

Bland leggy models on satin settees

More of that come-as-you-are talk

I have no idea what this means. But I love the way it
sounds.

15

THE
EPISODE OF THE GOLDEN TABLET AS TOLD IN THE FLYING SWAN

THE LAST THING I EXPECTED,
SAID LEONARD ‘LEGLESS’ LEMON, AS HE
leaned perilously
upon The Flying Swan’s highly polished bar top, ‘the
very
last thing I
expected when I opened my gaily painted front door yesterday was a bloody
emissary from the planet Venus come to award me the galaxy’s highest accolade.’

John
Omally spluttered into his pint of Large. ‘Word get out about your prize marrow
then, Len?’

Leonard
the legless ignored him. ‘The galaxy’s highest accolade,’ he said once more,
lingering upon each word, savouring each syllable.

‘Which
is?’ asked Neville, who always enjoyed a good yarn. ‘The Golden Tablet of Tosh m’Hoy,
inscribed with the sacred formula for denecrolization.’

Omally
nodded and raised his glass. ‘Who would have expected otherwise?’ he said.

‘And
what is
denecrolization,
when it’s at home?’ asked Neville.

‘That’s
for me to know, and you to find out.’

‘Stick
another half in here please, Neville,’ said John Omally, pushing his glass
across the counter.

‘You
never believe a bloody thing I tell you, do you, Omally?’ Legless Len made a
brave attempt at pathos, by putting on a wounded expression, but it, like the
point of owning a
file-o-fax,
was lost upon Omally.

‘To be
quite truthful, no,’ said John. ‘However, the doubting Thomas in me might
speedily be put to shame, were you to produce this golden tablet for his
perusal.’

‘Good
idea,’ said Neville. ‘Let’s have a look.’

And
others about the bar went, ‘Yes.’

The
legless one (and perhaps it should be explained here that this was legless as
in
drunk.
Not legless as in
legless)
became momentarily
flustered. ‘I don’t have it with me,’ he said. ‘I’ve sent it off to the British
Museum to have it valued.’

‘Ah,’
said Omally. A meaningful ‘Ah’.

And
someone said, ‘Yeah sure,’ and someone else said, ‘Cop out.’

‘But I
do have a photograph of it.’

‘Ah,’
said Omally, it was quite another ‘Ah’.

‘Go on,’
said Neville. ‘Whip it out.’

Legless
Leonard felt about for his snakeskin wallet. And from this he withdrew a
dog-eared photograph with somewhat tattered edges. This he held towards John.

‘So
what is that then, might I ask?’

John
scrutinized the photograph. ‘That,’ he announced, ‘is the photograph you always
show us when demanded to prove the authenticity of your claims. This picture
has, in the past, purported to be of you making love to Marilyn Monroe, you
shaking hands with J.F.K. before he was famous, you in the SAS saving a child
at an embassy siege, you parting the river Thames in the manner of Moses, you,
well, need I continue?’

Legless
Len made a surly face.

‘For
myself,’ said Omally, ‘and going on no more than the evidence provided by my
excellent vision, I believe this to be a photograph of you on a donkey at Great
Yarmouth.’

Mr
Lemon swallowed Scotch and then, excusing himself with talk of ‘a weak bladder
brought on by all yesterday’s excitement’, vanished away to the Gents.

Upon
his return he looked Omally up and down, declared him to be typical of his
class (whatever that meant), and slouched from the bar.

Omally
returned to his drinking and peace returned to The Swan, but only for a while
because the phone began to ring.

‘Flying
Swan,’ said Neville, lifting the receiver. ‘Yes,’ he continued after a short
pause. And, ‘Yes, Leonard Lemon, yes, no, he’s not here at the moment. A
message, hold on I’ll get a pencil.’ Neville got a pencil. ‘Go on. Yes. British
Museum, you say.

The
Swan took to one of its famous pregnant pauses.

‘Golden
tablet, not gold, you say. Unknown metal. Being passed on to a secret
government research establishment, tell Mr Lemon to report to Mornington
Crescent. Well, yes, I’ll tell him—’

‘Hang
about, Neville,’ Omally leaned over the counter and snatched the telephone. ‘That
horse came in at thirty to one, Len. Do you want me to collect your winnings or
shall I stick the lot on Lucky Lady?’

‘Collect
my winnings, you bloody Irish mad man.

Omally
replaced the receiver. ‘You know the terrible thing is,’ he said to Neville, ‘that
one day he’ll probably turn out to be telling the truth.’

THE
EPISODE OF THE GOLDEN TABLET AS LEONARD LEMON SAW IT

The previous day Len
returned from his allotment. He smelt strongly of those organic substances,
which though loved by rhubarb are so detested by the traveller who steps in
them.

‘If my
marrow does not win the coveted Silver Spade Award this year, then there is
absolutely no justice left in the world,’ he told his lady wife.

‘Yes,
dear,’ she said.

‘I
think I might take a bit of a bath now.

‘Yes,
dear.’

Legless
Len ascended his vilely carpeted staircase. He had purchased the carpet whilst
drunk. He was a happy man, was Len. A broad smile of the Cheshire Cat
persuasion bisected his ruddy workman’s face.

As he
ran the bath water he whistled ‘Sweet Marrow of My Heart’s Desire’ (one of his
own compositions).

Removing
his unsavoury undergarments he tested the water with a temperature-toe. ‘Oh
yes,’ he giggled. ‘Just right.’

As he
sank into the steaming scented water he heard the distinctive chimes of his
musical doorbell ringing out the opening bars of ‘The Harry Lime Theme’.

‘Hello,
hello, hello,’ said Len, who had once thought of joining the police force. ‘What
do we have here then?’

There
was some silence, then the sound of voices and then a bit more silence. Then
his wife called up the stairs. ‘Len,’ she called. ‘Len, there’s two fellas here
from the planet Venus. They’ve come to award you the galaxy’s highest accolade.’

Len
sank lower into his foaming bath tub. ‘Tell them to come back later,’ he
replied.

Len’s
wife passed the message on.

‘They
say they can’t wait,’ she called up this time. ‘They say they have to catch the
twelve-o’clock tide.’

Len
huffed and puffed then rose from his bath. He shrugged on his wife’s quilted
nylon dressing-gown and flip-flapped down the stairs leaving a dark damp
footprint on each and every vilely carpeted stair.

At the
door stood two enigmatic-looking bodies. Dressed in the ubiquitous one-piece
coverall uniforms so beloved of the cosmic traveller and sporting the
now-traditional mirror-visored weather-domes. They had a look which was at once
familiar but, also, at twice totally alien.

‘Ie-e-oo-ae-u,’
said Rork, the taller of the two.

‘Ao-e-uu-o-i,’
replied his companion, whose name was Gork.

Legless
Len, who had only done ‘O’ level Venusian at Horsenden Secondary School, nodded
his head.

‘This
is most unexpected,’ he said, but so that it came out, ‘Eo-i-u-o-i.’

‘His
enunciation of the former “i” lacked for inflection and there was far too
little slant on the “o—i” modulation,’ said Gork to Rork, ‘but other than that
it wasn’t bad for ‘O’ level Venusian.’

Len
overheard this remark. ‘Now just look here,’ he said in a heated tone. ‘I’m a
piss-artist jobby gardener, not a bleeding professor of languages.’

The
space travellers made apologetic vowel sounds.

‘I
should think so too,’ said Len.

And
then the space travellers went on to explain to Len that they had come to
bestow upon him the galaxy’s highest accolade.

‘Did
word get out about my marrow, then?’ asked Len.

Sadly
though, as the atmospheric conditions on Venus preclude the growing of almost
any vegetable (save alone the wily and adaptive sprout), Len’s question,
‘Ao-e-ii-o-marrow-ue?’
had the spacemen scratching their helmets.

Rork
spoke. ‘We understand that you are the inventor of the
Harris Tweed,’
was
what he said in translation.

Len
stroked a bath-foamed chin. ‘Inventor of the Harris Tweed, eh?’ Obviously the
old Venusian spy network was not all it might have been. Len looked the two
travellers up and down, they
had
come a very long way. And it
was
the
galaxy’s highest accolade.

‘Yep,
that’s me,’ lied Len. ‘Old Len “the tweed” Lemon, friend of the working man.’

The
Venusians passed Len the Golden Tablet of Tosh m’Hoy, made a small
vowel-encrusted speech, offered him a stiff salute and departed.