The Fandom of the Operator (16 page)

“Go to the toilet,” I said.

Barry went off to the toilet.

And I just dithered. If Mr Penrose had gone off for his lunch, then I couldn’t speak to him. So who could I speak to? What famous dead person would I really like to speak to? I thought hard about this, even harder than I had been thinking for the last couple of hours, and my conclusion was the same: quite a few of them. But I didn’t know the exact dates of their deaths. I was going to have to come back tomorrow night.

But then I thought of my daddy. I could phone him. And he had said that he had something fantastic that he wanted to tell me. I could phone my daddy.

Barry returned with a smile on his face.

“That was quick,” I said. “Where is the toilet?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Barry. “I just pissed in someone’s desk drawer.”

“You stupid sod.”

“Calm down,” said Barry. “It will be dry in the morning. Just a bit smelly. No one will suspect anything.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

“What? Aren’t you going to phone anyone? Mr Penrose will probably have finished his lunch by now. Time
is
different there.”

“I have to think,” I said. “I don’t want to waste this. I want to do it properly. To some purpose.”

“Please yourself, man. But if you’re not having a go, then I’m going to speak to Mr Penrose again.”

“What did he say?” I asked. “What is he like?”

“He’s OK,” said Barry. “A really nice bloke. Very forthcoming, very open. Talks a lot about sportsmanship. He’s very big on that. But he’s so angry. Someone did something to him. Did voodoo on him or something after he died and—”

“I don’t want to know,” I said. “I’m going home. Close the door on your way out. I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”

“I’m going to bring a tape recorder,” said Barry. “Get this on tape. This is big news. The world should know about this.”

“No,” I said. “Hold on. You can’t tell anyone about this.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No, I’m not kidding. This is beyond big. This is beyond anything. And it’s a secret. A government secret. If anyone found out that we’re doing this, that we’re unauthorized and doing this, we’d be in really big trouble. This is our secret. We can’t tell anyone. No one must know.”

“OK,” said Barry. “It’s our secret.”

“Let’s shake on this.” I put my hand out and Barry shook it. “Fair enough,” I said. “Now, I’m off. Some of us have to work in the morning.”

“Both of us have. Stuff it, I’ll call it a night in half an hour. See you tomorrow evening.”

“See you.” And so I left Barry and wandered off home.

I slept all alone in my bed, but I didn’t sleep very well. There were far too many bits and bobs whirling about in my head. FLATLINE was something so big that the implications of it all were beyond imagining. The very concept of definite contact with the dead. That changed everything, didn’t it? All theories of God and the hereafter. All of recorded history. It would now be possible to know literally everything. About exactly what happened in the past and exactly what happened after you died. Everything would be known. It was too much to think about. Too much for me, anyway.

The more I thought about it all, the more messed up I became. There was power here. Those who could speak with the dead could learn a lot. A whole lot. Einstein had probably thought up loads more important equations since he’d snuffed it. And all those other scientists and composers and geniuses. And all the murdered could identify their murderers – well, the ones who’d seen them, anyway. And, oh, the more I thought, the more messed up I became. This was such a
big
secret. The
biggest
secret.

And Barry and I were on the inside of it. We were an even bigger secret, because the men who held this secret didn’t know that we knew about it.

Eventually I did fall asleep, but, as I say, I did not sleep very well and when the alarm rang and I crawled off to the telephone exchange I was feeling very sick indeed.

And when I went into the bulb booth to relieve Barry, I was not altogether thrilled to find that Barry was fast asleep.

I awoke him with a kick in the ribs.

“Whoa!” went Barry, lurching into consciousness.

“Time to go home,” I told him.

“Oh yeah, man.” Barry yawned and stretched.

“Have a good night?” I asked him. “Chatting with Mr Penrose?”

“You’re not kidding. What a man. He told me all about the people he’d met and the things he’d done. I’m going to write his biography.”

“What?”

“Straight from the hearse’s mouth,” said Barry, grinning foolishly. “He’ll dictate it to me down the phone. It’s a secret, though; you can’t tell anyone.”

I made fists once again. “I’m not going to tell anyone, am I? But you can’t do this.”

“Why not? Give me one good reason.”

I couldn’t. “This is ridiculous,” I said.

“I think it’s brilliant. And when I’ve done Mr Penrose I’ll do some others. Mr Penrose says that the famous dead are crying out to the living, but the living can’t hear them. But we can hear them down the FLATLINE phone and they all want to dictate their life stories. You can do some too. We’ll be rich authors – there’s millions to be had in this.”

I gave my chin a stroke. Barry was right of course.

“I’m going to buy a tape recorder today,” said Barry. “We can just set it up at the phone and let Mr Penrose talk for as long as he likes each night. This is
so
brilliant.”

I gave my chin another stroke. This
was
brilliant, there was no doubt about that. “We will have to be
so
careful.”

“I’m going to call myself Macgillicudy Val Der Mar.”

“Eh?” said I.

“My pen name. My
nom de plume
. Mr Penrose gave it to me. I’ll keep working here until I’ve made a couple of million, then I’ll just vanish. Of course, by then I’ll have about a dozen other ‘biographies’ on the tape. So more millions, but far away from here and the Official Secrets Act. Somewhere that has no extradition treaties with the UK.”

“You’ve got all this worked out very quickly,” I observed.

“It’s all down to Mr Penrose.”

“This is dangerous,” I said. “Very dangerous.”

“You’re not kidding. But we can both get very rich on this. And we can get out of here. Do you want to spend the rest of your life flicking this switch, or do you want riches and out?”

I gave the matter a bit of thought.

“I want riches and out,” I said.

Life eh?

What’s it all about, then?

How many times have we heard that question asked? And how many answers are there to that question? Hundreds? Thousands? Of all the questions man has ever asked, that one seems to have the most answers. And the thing about those answers, which in fact unites those answers, no matter how diverse and contradictory those answers might be, is that they all come from people who think they know; are sure they know; but don’t really know at all.

No one knows.

No one living, anyway.

The dead know. But the dead know everything. The dead know so much stuff that if the living were to find it all out from the dead, the living would be scared to death. And then they’d know it all for themselves anyway.

The trouble is, and it is a
big
trouble, that although the dead know everything, they are not always entirely honest and forthcoming when they pass their knowledge on to the living.

Take the Virgin Mary, for instance. She’s dead and she knows everything. But when she chooses to manifest in front of some peasant boys and girls on some hillside somewhere, does she ever have anything interesting to say? Anything profound and earth-shattering? Not a bit of it. And this woman was the mother of God.

Mind you, I don’t blame her for not having much to say. She must still be a very confused woman. Unless someone has got around to explaining to her exactly what her relationship with her son really is. I mean, as far as I’ve heard it, there is God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost inseminated Mary and she gave birth to God the Son. But the Holy Ghost and God the Son are both aspects of God the Father; they are ultimately one and the same. Which means that Jesus was his own father and Mary was inseminated by her own, as yet unborn, son. Which might mean that Jesus sends himself a card on Father’s Day, but can’t send Mary a card on Mother’s Day, because being also God the Father he was around long before Mary was even born.

Christmas dinners must be a laugh at God’s house. And although Jesus, God the Son, has a birthday to celebrate, His dad, who is also Himself, doesn’t, because He was never born.

So, yeah, Mary manifests and she doesn’t have much to say. But the rest of the dead, and there’s a lot of’em, they’ve all got something or other they’d just love to say to the living, but they can’t. They can’t get through because it just doesn’t work like that.

But then, once in a very long while, one of them does manage to get through and, having made this momentous move, do they say something incredible? Do they pass on their profound cosmic wisdom? Do they heck! They all screw up. They do, they really do. They lie, they deceive, they are frankly dishonest. Why? Won’t someone tell me why? Does anybody know?

A century or more of hard grind on the part of the Society of Psychical Research has turned up positively nothing. Nothing that will hold up in court as definite irrefutable contact with the dead. And why? Not because the dead did not contact the living, but because when they did they came out with a lot of old toot and confused the issue further.

My heart truly bleeds for all those mediums sitting at tables trying to contact “the other side”. And those psychic questers like Danbury Collins constantly being led up blind alleys by spirit guides. And the channellers, channelling away and the Spiritualist Church and all those who receive information from “Higher Sources”.

I’m sorry, it’s not my fault, but the dead cannot be trusted.

So, yeah, right.
Now
I’m asking. Now, at the point in my life that I’ve reached. The point that I’m writing about now. Because at this point I didn’t know. But then at this point I wasn’t aware that the dead did lie to the living. I wasn’t really sure that the dead could talk to the living. Although I had had that brief conversation with my father. Or thought I had. Or believed I had. Because I had a real problem convincing myself that what was going on with the FLATLINE programme was actually real.

I wanted it to be real and I really, really wanted to talk to Mr Penrose. If just to say that I was sorry for reawakening him in his coffin. But I was having difficulties with the concept of the thing.

Because, I suppose, I was having difficulties with the concept of life. My life. Everything that happened to me seemed to happen so fast. It just came out of nowhere and hit me. It woke me up out of my dreams. Or it
was
my dreams and I didn’t remember the times when I was awake.

Or something.

But I couldn’t seem to keep up. And I certainly couldn’t sleep. If sleeping
was
sleeping and being awake
was
being awake.

I remember that I did a lot of late-night pacing. Up and down in the bedroom.
All alone
in the bedroom.

I was certain that Sandra had said that she was only going away for a week. But it was nearly two weeks now and she still wasn’t back. And I actually missed her. I know that we didn’t have much of a marriage. Well, anything of a marriage, really. We didn’t have sex any more and when she wasn’t laughing at me, or criticizing me, she was away at work and I wasn’t seeing her anyway. And now she was away on holiday with Count Otto and I was missing her like crazy.

Why? Well, I don’t know why. Because I loved her, I suppose. I know that there wasn’t much to love about her any more. But I could think back to our honeymoon in Tenerife, when I loved her and she loved me in return and that was a happy time. We would make love in the banana plantations and she would run around afterwards with her clothes off, impersonating ponies. Those were the days. They were. They really were.

And I felt certain that those days would return. Because I had the power to make them return. Barry and I would become millionaires, and Sandra would like being married to a millionaire. Even if that millionaire had to flee the British Isles. Perhaps we’d move to Tenerife. She would love me again, I knew that she would, and all would be well and happy again.

The matter seemed simple to me. My wife no longer loved me because she no longer respected me. So I would regain her respect and she would love me again.

Sorted. She would respect me if I became a millionaire, I was certain about that. Which left only the matter of the opposition, the fly in the marmalade, the sand in the suntan lotion, the boil on the marital backside, Count Otto Black.

He’d have to go. And go for good.

The count would have to die.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. I didn’t come to this decision without a great crisis of conscience. In fact, it was the greatest crisis of conscience that I had experienced in nearly ten years.

The last time I had such a crisis of conscience was at the trial of the Daddy.

When I had given evidence in the witness box.

I know I said earlier that I didn’t attend the trial, and I didn’t,
not as a spectator
. And I was only there for half an hour anyway. And the trial did drag on for weeks. I think it would have dragged on for weeks and weeks more, and all at the taxpayers’ expense, if I hadn’t given my evidence. If I hadn’t got up in the witness box and had my say.

You see, it all hinged on the mother’s evidence. She’d been there when the butchery took place. But the counsel for the defence said that she was an unreliable witness.

So I got up and said my piece. And it did involve a crisis of conscience. Because I had to swear on oath and tell the truth and everything. So I explained how I knew that Mum was being sexed by the ice-cream man on Wednesday evenings when Dad was out playing darts at the Legion. And how I saw everything happen on that terrible evening.

It was my evidence that hanged him.

Crisis of conscience, you see. You can understand that. Should I own up and be honest and tell the truth, or should I lie? I chose to tell the truth, which hanged my daddy. I could have kept quiet, I could have lied, but I didn’t.

Well, I wouldn’t have, would I?

I’m an honest fellow.

And I’d gone to a lot of trouble anyway.

A lot of trouble. But then, it takes a lot of trouble to commit the perfect crime. Which I had done.

You see, I really hated that ice-cream man for sexing my mother. I wanted him dead. But I didn’t have the nerve to kill him myself and I was sure that, even if I’d had the nerve, I’d have been caught. So I needed someone to do it for me. Which was why on that fateful night I phoned the Legion and tipped off my father, in a disguised voice, of course, that the ice-cream man was on his way over to sex his wife. I phoned a little early, you see, because I needed time to go and hide myself in the wardrobe. So I could watch the murdering. So I could give evidence. Because I wanted the Daddy dead too, horrible swine that he was.

It was two perfect crimes in one, really. Which is pretty damn good, in my opinion.

So one more perfect crime wasn’t going to hurt.

And I had, during the course of all my pacing and heartbreaking, come up with a really good one to rid myself of Count Otto. It was such a good one, in fact, that I felt certain that even if Sherlock Holmes teamed up with Miss Marple, Ironside, Lazlo Woodbine and Inspector Clouseau, my name would never come up once during the course of the investigation.

It would be the perfect crime.

And it sort of was. Or would have been. I’m not quite sure, really. Things certainly didn’t turn out the way I’d planned. But that’s life for you, isn’t it? Full of surprises, and none of them, in my opinion, pleasant.

So let me tell you the story of what happened. I’m sorry if I bored you for a bit with all the talk about life and death and the dead not telling the truth and me not knowing why and suchlike. But it’s all relevant and it did provide the opportunity for me to own up about my dad and the ice-cream man, because I’m being honest here: I’m telling you all of the truth, the whole truth, as it happened.

I had come up with a three-phase plan to win Sandra back and I was certain it would work.

Now, I must have been asleep. My face was in the ravioli. I’d cooked it myself in the new macrowave oven the night before last. You probably don’t remember macrowave ovens. They were the Betamax of the microwave revolution. They never really caught on. I suppose it was their size. Ours, which was about the size of a Mini Metro, took up most of the kitchen area. But it
was
fast. It could reduce an entire Friesian cow to ashes in about 0.3 seconds. I think the macrowave oven accounted for a lot of people who supposedly went “missing” back in the early seventies. You could definitely commit the perfect crime with a macrowave oven.

They were soon withdrawn. The macrowaves leaked out, apparently. I know that all my checked suits became plain suits and the wardrobe was two rooms away. And all the fur fell out of our cat. And it used to cast my shadow up the kitchen wall when it was on. And years later the shadow was still there and couldn’t be washed off.

It was red hot with ravioli though. It cooked up ravioli so fast that it was done before you even put it in.

So there I was, asleep or something, face down in my plate of ravioli, when suddenly I’m being struck around the back of the head by something hard, which I later identify as being the piece of breezeblock that I was carving into a facsimile of Noddy Holder,
[19]
by Sandra, who had made an unexpected return to the marital home.

“Wake up, you piece of scum,” Sandra shouted, loud enough for me to hear but not appreciate. “Wake up and look at this mess.”

I woke up and looked at the mess.

And when I’d got over the shock of being woken, I showed no surprise at the mess whatsoever.

“I recognize this mess,” I told Sandra. “It was here yesterday and also the day before. Why are you striking me on the head to draw my attention to it?”

“It’s
your
mess!” shouted Sandra, and she surely shrieked.

“Cease the shrieking!” I said to her. “There’s a man upstairs who flew Spitfires. You’ll frighten him.”

“He died years ago. You lazy bastard. I go away for a few days of well-earned rest …”

“Did you have a nice time?” I asked, from beneath the table where I cowered, still ducking from the blows.

“No,” said Sandra. “I got thrush.”

“Give it to the cat,” I said. “It will be grateful for a bit of fresh meat. I haven’t fed it for a week.”

Sandra struck me with renewed vigour.

I crawled out from under the table and now, being fully awake, clopped her one across the nose, which sent her reeling and caused her to relinquish her hold upon the breezeblock, which she dropped, breaking Noddy Holder’s nose.

“Now look what you’ve done,” I said.

“What
I’ve
done,” said Sandra, clutching at her bloodied nose. “You hit me! You hit me!”

“You started it,” I said.

“I’ll have you for this. I’ll sue you. You’re finished.”

I sighed sadly. “Welcome home,” I said.

“You call this home?”

“Let me make you a cup of tea,” I said. “Did you bring me back a stick of rock?”

“I’m leaving you,” said Sandra. “I can’t take any more.”

I sat myself back down in the chair I had so recently been knocked from. “We’ve got off to a bit of a bad start here,” I said. “So let’s let bygones be bygones and start again. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about our relationship and I think I’ve come up with a solution. Firstly—”

“Shut up!” shouted Sandra. “Shut up!”

“Firstly, I think we should go out together more. No, not now, because I have a lot on in the evenings, but soon, then—”

“Shut up!”

“And I’ve bought this book,
Bring the Bounce Back into Your Marital Sex Life Through Bestiality
. We’ll have your pussy earn its thrush, eh?”

“Shut up!” Sandra took up dirty plates and threw them in my direction.

“And counselling,” I said. “Marriage counselling. I found this ad in the
Brentford Mercury
. We can go and see this marriage counsellor. She’s a young woman and she’ll help us sort things out. It costs quite a bit, but it will be worth it. We’ll be all right for a threesome and if you’re not too keen to do it with me at first, I don’t mind, I’ll just watch.”