Sprout Mask Replica (36 page)

‘I
hereby make a field commission, I hereby raise you to the rank of captain.’

‘You
can’t do that, sir. I’d have to become a corporal, then a sergeant, then a—’

‘Don’t
you want to be a captain?’

‘Well I’d
like to, sir, like to very much.’

‘Then
you
are
a captain, OK?’

‘Well,
OK, yes, thanks very much.’

‘And
so,
captain,
will you now operate RUPERT?’

‘As
soon as I receive orders so to do. Yes.’

‘I have
just issued you orders so to do.’

‘But I
now hold the same rank as you captain. You can’t order me to do anything.’

‘Sergeant
Lemon, arrest this man,’ ordered Captain Vez.

‘Ignore
that order, sergeant,’ said Captain McGeddon.

‘Stop
all this at
once!’
shouted Sir John Rimmer. ‘I’m not fooled by these
delaying tactics. One of you’s an enemy agent. One of you has a sprout in the
head. Which one is it?’

‘This
man is clearly a fruit cake,’ said Captain McGeddon. ‘Sergeant, have him
removed to beyond the perimeter fence.’

‘It’s
you!’
screamed Sir John.

Captain
Vez drew out his pistol. ‘Leave Sir John alone,’ he ordered, ‘and
you,
Captain
McGeddon, stand out of the way.’

‘Drawing
a weapon on a fellow officer is a court martial offence,’ said the new captain.
‘Paragraph 23, subsection 18. No officer shall—’

‘Shut
up. And you’re now stripped of your rank, you’re a private again.’

‘You
can’t do that. Only a senior officer can strip me of my rank. Article 15,
Clause 28.’

‘I
thought Clause 28 was something to do with homosexuals,’ said Danbury Collins.

‘We don’t
have homosexuals in the armed forces,’ said Captain McGeddon.

‘Perhaps
you’re not asking nicely enough,’ said Danbury. ‘Perhaps if you put up some
posters in gay bars you—’

‘Shut
up!’ shouted Captain Vez.

‘Touchy,’
said Danbury.

‘All
closet bum boys,’ called a stumpy woman through the perimeter fence.

‘Oh
come on,
please,’
implored Sir John. ‘This is of the utmost importance.
We must capture the alien craft.’

‘Capture
an alien craft?’ called an old bloke, joining the stumpy woman. Bloody Army
couldn’t capture a dose of the clap nowadays. It’s all virtual reality and
battle simulations. Not like in my time when we were sticking it up Jerry.’

‘Another
one of them,’ said Stumpy.

Danbury
tittered.

‘Remove
those civilians,’ ordered Captain Vez.

‘Stuff
you,’ called some young-fellow-me-lads. ‘We’re on our side of the wire.’

‘Give
me that controller,’ said Sir John, making a snatch for it. ‘Certainly not,’
said Captain Vez, stepping backwards and falling over RUPERT.

‘Drunk
on duty,’ said Captain McGeddon. ‘I am hereby assuming command.’

‘No you’re
bloody
not!’
Captain V fired his pistol (he still had it in his hand,
the hand that wasn’t holding the remote control unit —  in case you were
wondering). He shot Danbury Collins in the foot.

‘Aaaagh!
I’m shot!’ howled Danbury, collapsing into the line of soldiers and knocking
several down.

Outside
the wire, members of the Brentford populace howled also. The shooting of
civilians by military personnel was something deeply frowned upon in this neck
of the suburban woods.

‘Give
me that gun,’ shouted Captain McGeddon, leaping onto Captain Vez and wrestling
at his wrist.

As the
crowd outside the wire began to grow and to shout abuse, Sir John snatched the
controller from Captain Vez’s other hand.

‘Give
that back, and let go of me, McGeddon. Shoot this officer, someone, there’s a
commission in it for the first man who does.’

Those
soldiers who hadn’t fallen under Danbury hastened to load their weapons. But
not all were on the side of Captain V. Some, as if driven by an inner
compulsion, an inner-head compulsion, turned their guns not upon Captain McGeddon,
but upon Captain Vez himself. ‘Not me,
him!’
shouted the good captain.

‘Break
this up,’ shouted Sergeant Lemon, drawing a weapon of his own and firing it
into the air. It was an unlucky shot, ricocheting as it did from one of the
helicopter blades and blowing the straw hat off a woman in the growing crowd.

‘Storm
troopers and Cossacks!’ bawled the old bloke, beating on the wire with his fist
and receiving an electrical discharge that set his wig ablaze.

A bit
of a mêlée then ensued.

Soldiers
within the wire began to fight amongst themselves, as soldiers will when the
opportunity arises. The pro-Captain V contingent fell upon the pro-Captain M
contingent and likeways about. Those undecided fell upon each other. Some fell
upon Danbury who was struggling up.

‘You’re
all bloody mad,’ cried Dr Harney, striking down Sergeant Lemon.

Sir
John Rimmer crept under the helicopter, dragging the video monitor with him and
began to twiddle at the controls. RUPERT rumbled off into the hole in the
ground.

‘Storm
the wire!’ cried the old bloke, beating out his wig. ‘Overthrow the military
dictatorship.’

Certain
young fellow-me-lads who had arrived upon the scene as the pubs were turning
out took to hot-wiring a nearby car, in preparation for a ram raid.

The
stumpy woman consoled the lady without the straw hat. ‘All men are bastards,
Mum,’ was what she had to say.

‘Call
me an ambulance,’ cried Danbury.

‘You’re
an ambulance,’ replied the crowd, eager to respond to such a classic.

More
soldiers fell on Danbury and he said nothing more.

RUPERT
had his headlights on now and Sir John steered him along the tunnel, seeing
what he saw on the video monitor.

Soldiers
biffed and bopped and banged at each other. Dr Harney rolled by with Sergeant
Lemon clinging to his throat.

Brrm, Brrm,
went a nearby car, now thoroughly hot-wired. ‘I’ll deal with these soldier
boys,’ said the straw-hatless woman, whipping out a Saturday-night special.

‘I’ll
join you,’ said daughter Stumpy, drawing an Uzi from her shoulder-bag.

Brrm, Brrrm
and Rush-Forward, went the hot-wired car. ‘Fire at will!’ shouted the still
struggling Captain Vez, as the car passed through the wire fence in a burst of
electrical sparkings. ‘Fire at will!’

There
was a sudden silence, which either meant that it was twenty-to-something or
twenty-past-something, or simply meant that no-one present really had the nerve
to reply ‘Which one’s Will?’ Well, not after the ambulance gag, anyway.

Bang!
Bang! went the soldiers’ guns, firing every which way.

Bang!
Bang! also went the hatless woman’s Saturday-night special.

Rat-at-at-at-at-at-at
went Stumpy’s Uzi. Now there’s a proper gun for you.

‘Urban
guerrillas!’ cried a military fellow, labouring to pull the pin from a hand
grenade.

Brrm, Brrm,
went the hot-wired car, running over the top of him.

Sir
John Rimmer stared at the monitor screen. He could see it, the sporran-shaped
scout craft. Its opening parts part open, the glimmer of green within.

‘Gotcha!’
said Sir John, twiddling at the controller and extending the arms with the
gripping end-pieces. ‘Out you come, you little—’

Rumble,
went something. Something
big.
It was a
rumble to be heard and felt above the shouting voices, the firing guns, the
scream of a hot-wired engine, this was a rumble that said, I AM A RUMBLE.

Much in
the way that an earthquake does.

As Sir
John’s eyes widened behind the lenses of his horn-rimmed specs he saw on the
screen a pin-point of light appear through the scout craft’s opening parts and
grow to a blinding flash that blew out the tube of the monitor. The rumble
became a shudder, became a fierce vibration. A dazzling laser-like beam of
energy shot up from the burrow and soared into the sky, mini-lightning flashed
about it. The rumble grew and grew.

‘It’s
going to blow,’ cried Sir John, leaping to his feet and striking his head on
the underside of the helicopter. ‘It’s going to self-destruct. Run everyone,
run as fast as you can.’ He looked all around. ‘Oh, I see that you have.’

And
they
had.
Well you don’t catch the folk of Brentford napping. They’ve
seen all this stuff too many times before.

Sir
John snatched up Danbury by the collar of his one-piece coverall and took to
his not-inconsiderable heels.

Within
the wired, although now holed-by-a-car, compound the ground cleaved open and a
massive space craft, easily the size of, well, let’s see, oh it was huge, I don’t
know, how about St Paul’s Cathedral, that’s pretty big, rose slowly into the
sky. It was round and it was green, in short (or in spherical), it was
sprout-like. Lights twinkled on its shimmering sides, or side (because a sphere
has only the one), and through lighted portholes small green spheroids could be
seen bouncing up and down.

Up and
up it went into the star-strung sky until with a sudden mind-jarring
acceleration and a trailing stream of bright green sparks it was gone into the
heavens.

Sir John Rimmer raised his
head from behind a garden wall and stared up at the night sky. All silent now.
Just white dots on a black background. And as Sir John looked he fancied that
he could see numbers upon those dots, as if one could join them up and spell
out a message. And as he traced dot to dot with a finger not unlike a haricot
bean, he also fancied that there was a message there.

And the
message was.

WE’LL
BE BACK.

THE
CURES (Dedicated to Spike Milligan)

The scales of the fish

Help to ward off the plague

When worn in a sack round the neck

The wings of the gull

Stop pains in the skull

And convulsions that leave you a wreck

The froth from your beer

Is good for diarrhoea

And sand is the thing for the pox

A helping of stew

When poured in your shoe

Fills up the holes in your socks

Frogs, say the sage,

Will starve off old age

Jelly’s the thing for the gout

A spoonful of soot

Stops athlete’s foot

And soon has you up and about

Eight pints of oil

Soothe the spot and the boil

Some speak of cider and cheese

But the stuff for the flu

Is a tube-full of glue

And cabbages strapped to the knees

Or so my gran says.

But what about my ringworm then, Gran?

26

THE
END

AND
SO IT ENDS AS IT BEGAN, WITH A SIMPLE POEM.

And as I sit here all
alone in Hotel Jericho, drawing the final line beneath the final paragraph on
the final page of my final red exercise book, I feel a sense of satisfaction,
if not a little of finality.

For
sure I never changed the world for the better, but who really could? As Colon
might have said, life is not about what happens to you, it’s about how you deal
with it.

I
rarely venture far from the hotel and when I do it is only at night. I have to
be conscious of my every movement. I became too adept at causing change to
occur during my stay in America. Now I have to take great care over everything
I do. From the way I clip my toenails to the side I part my hair.

A
millimetre too short on the right big toe and Germany might win the cup again.
Too many hairs to the left-hand side and flares will be back in fashion. I
abused my gift and so must pay the price of solitude.

I have
some pleasures left. Small pleasures, trivial things. I watch a lot of
television. I like to see all the politicians compensating away, never causing
anything to happen, just balancing what does with a hand-tuck into a
tailored-suit or an adjustment of the spectacles.

I have
few callers now. The occasional Jehovah’s Witness, a lady with a straw hat who
sharpens my biros. But I am contented.

Given
my time over again, I might have done things differently.