Sprout Mask Replica (33 page)

But
they weren’t fingers any more, they were tubes of toothpaste. All with the tops
unscrewed and these streams of different-coloured toothpaste oozing out and
twisting all about.

‘Do
something else, chief. Wink your eyes, waggle your ears, anything. Anything.’

I
winked and waggled for all I was worth.

A black
limousine drew up beside me. A black window swished down and the face of Small
Dave grinned out. ‘Time to be off to the gig,’ he giggled.

‘That’s
not right.’

‘Waggle
some more. Do something, anything.’

‘I’ve
got your brother in the back,’ called Small Dave. ‘He’s all ready for you. All
trussed up. If you butcher him now, we can eat him together.’

‘Barry,
get me out of this.’

‘Only
you can, chief, only you.

The
ground began to sink beneath me and I jumped aside. Something rose from the
earth, something huge and hairy. Parts groaned open to expose green things
within. Emeralds surely, large as tennis balls.

‘Run,
chief, and waggle while you run.

The
street tipped alarmingly and I ran in the downhill direction. ‘That’s him,’
cried a woman in a straw hat. She sat astride a great white horse, at the head
of a legion of Cossacks. ‘He’s to blame for it all. Deviant, he’s destroyed the
entire programme. Trample down the deviant.’

‘Run
and waggle, chief, run and waggle.’ I ran and I waggled as I ran.

‘Tell
me what’s happening, Barry,’ I howled.

And
then I was in amongst the crowd, the cheering crowd.

The
cheering, singing, stamping crowd. And it wasn’t thousands, it was millions.
Millions and millions.

I was
near the front. Near the stage. I could see the band. Sonic Energy Authority.
They seemed to be playing in slow motion, but the sound was accelerated. Too
fast to catch, a high-pitched scream. And then I saw the bass player, Panay Cloudrunner
and he looked down at me and he pointed and the music stopped and the crowd
stilled and they all looked at me and they stared and they pointed. And Litany was
there, sitting on my brother’s shoulders and she stared and pointed too and so
did he.

‘He
never killed me,’ said Panay Cloudrunner pointing at me. ‘I killed
myself. I was speeding out of my brain, I’d run down seven people before I hit
the road block. They never put that in the paper. They wanted him to feel
guilty, they wanted him dead.’

‘Is
that true, Barry?’

‘Don’t
take any notice,’ said my Uncle Brian, putting his hand upon my shoulder. ‘They’re
just trying to confuse you. It’s the iron, you see. The iron in the guitar
strings. If you can free yourself from the influence of iron, you can do
anything, absolutely anything.’

‘Don’t
listen to your uncle, dear,’ said my mum. ‘He’s quite mad. The whole family’s
quite mad. Always has been, always will be, of course you were adopted, the
fairies left you on the doorstep.’

‘They
were my fairies,’ said Uncle Brian. ‘The lad had a mission. He was the Chosen
One, sent up from below to balance things out. If he hadn’t run off I would
have explained everything to him.’

‘Everything
about
what?
Barry, what is he talking about?’

‘This
isn’t real, chief, you’re imagining it all. Please try to concentrate, waggle
your fingers, bring back the Holy Guardians.’

‘I don’t
understand. What’s happening?’

‘It’s
very straightforward,’ said my Uncle Brian. ‘The world is dissolving. Reality
is dissolving. Everything is returning to chaos.’

‘I didn’t
mean that to happen. I wanted people to be free.’

‘Well,
they’re going to be free now. Free of all existence. That’s the ultimate in freedom,
I suppose. Well done.’

‘That’s
not what I intended.’

‘Waggle
your fingers, chief. Stop it now.’

‘I want
to know the truth. Won’t anyone tell me the truth?’

‘I’ll
tell you.

I
turned at the voice. What a voice that was. Charismatic. A real blinder of a
voice. The kind of voice that could talk a Tesco’s frozen turkey into a
tug-o-war team.

‘Colon,’
I said, ‘the super-dense proto-hippy.’

‘You’d
better call the Holy Guardians back,’ said Colon, sweet as you please.

‘I must
know the truth.’

‘There
is no ultimate truth,’ said my Uncle Brian.

‘You
keep out of this.’

‘I’ll
tell you the truth.’ said Colon. ‘But first call back the Holy Guardians.’

‘No I
won’t,’ I said, surprising even myself. ‘Not until I know the truth.’

‘One
part of knowledge,’ said Colon, ‘consists of being ignorant of such things as
must never be known.’

And
then the green sky cracked completely and night was upon us. Colon and I stood
alone upon an endless expanse of absolutely nothing. Black earth below, black
sky above, but a sky made beautiful by stars.

Colon
stared up at them. ‘Have you managed to join up those dots yet?’ he asked. ‘Have
you divined the Big Answer?’

‘No, I
haven’t.’

‘That’s
a pity. I felt sure that you would.’

‘Have
you?’

‘Oh
yes,’ said Colon.

‘You
lying git.’

‘I have
too.’

‘You
never have.’

‘Have
too.’

‘So
what is it then?’

‘It’s
the future,’ said Colon. ‘The light from the stars comes to us from the past,
it spells out the future.’

‘What a
load of old rubbish. Where are we, by the way? It’s getting very nippy.’

‘Allow me
to explain,’ said Colon, ‘about your gift, about everything.’

‘Will
any of this be the truth?’ I asked. ‘Because so far everyone has lied to me
about pretty much everything.’

‘People
mostly lie because they don’t know what the truth is.

‘You’re
never caught short for a New Age platitude, are you?’

‘Will
you bloody shut up and listen?’

‘Well,
excuse
me.

‘Your
gift,’ said Colon, in rather a stern voice I thought. ‘The mythical mystical
butterfly of chaos theory—’

‘I
know, the one that flutters its wings up the Orinoco and causes the price of
condoms to go up in Tierra del Fuego.’

‘The
same. It’s the butterfly of
chaos theory.
Not the butterfly of
Order
Theory.
When it flutters its wings it does not bring order out of chaos, it
does exactly the reverse. When you used your “gift” you did exactly the same.

‘I only
tried to help people. To help mankind, and I would have succeeded, but I kept
getting exploited and sabotaged.’

‘But
you could have expected nothing more. You couldn’t change the world for the
better, no matter how good your intentions were. You could only make things
worse by your interference.’

‘My
heart was in the right place,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with trying to
change mankind for the better. They all got a day at the seaside. Well, most of
them did. Listen, all right, I’ll have another go. I won’t screw up this time.’

‘You
can only screw up. You don’t understand how things work.’

‘Because
no-one will tell me the truth. Will
you
tell me the truth? Now, before I
waggle the fingers that I see have returned to me.

‘The
Holy Guardians,’ said Colon.

‘Oh,
not them again.’

‘Yes,
them again. What do you think Guardians do?’

‘Well,
they guard things, obviously.’

‘And
what do the
Holy
Guardians do?’

‘Guard
people, I suppose.’

‘From
what?’

‘From
other people, from themselves—’

‘Wrong,’
said Colon.

‘Oh
well, I don’t know, you tell me.’

‘Chaos,’
said Colon.

‘That
again, eh?’

‘That
again, yes. The order that is life on earth is a very fragile affair, difficult
to maintain and easily tipped back into chaos. The universe isn’t still and
peaceful, it’s whirling chaos. Chaos is its natural order. The Holy Guardians
are there to protect mankind from this chaos, and also to be the conscience of
man, the inner voice. What raises man above the animals, what will one day
allow him to join up the dots and read the Big Answer.’

‘And
Captain Kirk told you this, right?’

Colon
made an exasperated face. ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘The universe is a very chaotic
place.’

‘It
doesn’t seem too chaotic to me, the moon goes round the Earth, the Earth goes
round the sun.’

‘And in
a couple of billion years the sun will go super nova and explode, which will be
pretty chaotic.’

‘Yeah,
well that’s a long way off in the future.’

‘That’s
diddly-squat in universal time, that’s half a second.’

‘Well,
I don’t think that concerns us here.’

‘Well
it concerns me. I’m responsible.’

‘You’re
what?’

‘Well,
I am God,’ said Colon.

‘You’re
who?’

‘God,’
said Colon. ‘I think you’ve heard of me. You’ve dispatched all my Holy
Guardians and reduced my planet to chaos. I should be very angry with you.’

‘You’re
never God,’ I said. ‘If you’re God, then tell me something, why did you invent
the bluebottle?’

‘I don’t
believe I’m hearing this. I have just told you I’m God and you’re asking me
about bluebottles. You don’t feel that perhaps you should be prostrating
yourself and begging forgiveness?’

‘Frankly
no,’ I said. ‘Because I don’t believe any of this. I think I’m probably lying
unconscious in a gutter somewhere, dreaming the whole damn lot.’

‘OK,’
said Colon. ‘If that’s the way you want it, don’t believe in me. See if I care.’

‘Fair
enough, I won’t.’

‘Just
waggle your fingers and return all my Holy Guardians.’

‘No.’

‘What
do you mean, no? You can’t say no to God.’

‘Oh yes
I can. If you’re God, then
you
waggle
your
fingers. You bring
back your stupid Holy Guardians.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why
not?’

‘Because
I’m not allowed to interfere in human affairs.’

‘Why
not?’

‘Because
it’s written into my contract. I only have the franchise for this particular
planet and it’s a real struggle to hold it all together I can tell you, but I
can’t act directly. I can’t interfere.’

‘You’re
interfering now. You’re trying to persuade me to do something.’

‘It’s a
vision. Visions are allowed.’

‘This
is all absolute nonsense. I’m getting out of here. But I’ll tell you one thing.’

‘What’s
that?’

‘You’ve
just given me a great idea. I
will
bring back the Holy Guardians, if it’s
the only way to restore some kind of order, but I think you’re onto something
with this God business. I think I’ll give that a go.’

‘You’ll
what?’

‘Sssh
now, I’m waggling.’

MORE
ABOUT PIRATES AND CANNIBALS

The longboats of the sorry wreck

Brought pirate men ashore.

Cloony, hiding on the deck

Was not too keen on desert isles

And cannibals with pointed smiles

And so he thought he’d stick it out and wait for dawn
to come.

The longboats landed on the beach

The pirates disembarked.

Cloony sat and ate a peach,

And looked around the captain’s bed,

And wondered what the captain read,

And downed another glass of rum and ran himself a
bath.

The longboats lay on golden sand

The pirates all were gone.

They really were a dismal band,

And filled the guts of native folk

Who have no time to sing and joke

But have enormous appetites for men and fish and
fowl.

At dawn the ship broke free again

And Cloony floated off,

And soon was in Dundee again,

With captain’s robes and piles of gold,

But luck is hard and luck is cold

For Cloony was arrested as a pirate and was hanged.