Necrophenia (4 page)

It was well after midnight when I got home. Which I found somewhat surprising as I was sure that it was hardly ten.

My mother and father were still up. Because mothers and fathers stayed up in those days if schoolboys didn’t arrive home until well gone midnight. And mothers and fathers generally had quite definite things to say to the late-returning youth.

They were both in the hall as I entered.

I pushed open the front door, which was never locked, because no one ever locked their doors back in those days. Well, not in our neighbourhood, anyway.

It wasn’t that people were more honest in those days. No, it really wasn’t that. It was that we, along with our neighbours and most other folk in our neighbourhood, had absolutely nothing whatsoever worth stealing.

Except, of course, for the Sea-Monkeys.

But then, as everyone had Sea-Monkeys in those days, there was really no need to walk into someone else’s home through their unlocked front door and steal theirs.

So I pushed open our unlocked front door to find my mother and father waiting in the hall.

‘Hello, Mother,’ I said. ‘Hello, Father. I have some really exciting news.’ And then I gave the hall the once-over. But for my mother and my father and now myself, it was otherwise empty.

‘Where’s my bike?’ I asked. ‘I left it here in the hall.’

‘Someone’s nicked it,’ said my father. ‘Probably either that travelling mendicant who specialised in gutha pertha dolls, or that gatherer of the pure who popped in earlier to share a joke about beards and baldness.’

‘Right,’ I said. Slowly and definitely. ‘Right, I see.’

‘You do,’ said my father. ‘You do.’

And I did. In a manner of speaking.

‘And you are late,’ said my father, pointing to his wrist, where a wristwatch, had he worn one, would have been and then towards the circular light patch of wallpaper where, until quite recently, our hall clock had hung. ‘It’s after midnight.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and I am confused about this.’

‘How so?’ asked my father, already unbuckling his belt.

And, I knew, preparing himself inwardly for the beating he was about to administer, which would be prefaced with the words ‘this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you’.

‘Well,’ I said, wondering quietly to myself whether tonight might be that night. That night, which I had been assured by my peers would one day come, when I would stand up to my father and, as a result of him now being old and frail and myself young and in the peak of my physical fitness, mete out to him many summary blows to the skull and never again feel that belt of his across my rarely washed bottom. ‘Well-’

‘Well what?’

I shuddered, silently. It was not going to be that night.

‘Well, sir,’ I said, ‘I don’t understand two things in particular. One being how come it is now after midnight, because I am absolutely sure it was only a quarter to ten just a few minutes ago.’

‘And secondly?’ asked my father, his belt now off and his trousers falling to beneath his knees for the lack of its support.

‘Secondly,’ I said, ‘how we actually know that it’s after midnight, as we no longer have any means of accurately telling the time in this house.’

‘The boy has a point there,’ said my mother, who, I must say, in praise of her loving humanity, hated to see my father laying about me with his belt.

She always thought he went far too easy on me and would have much preferred to have done the job herself.

There were some times when I actually wished that we did not live in the enlightened times of the nineteen-sixties, but back in Mediaeval days.

Because in those days I could have denounced my mum as a witch and had the very last laugh.

‘I think twelve of the best are in order,’ said my father, struggling one-handedly with his trousers.

And then he beckoned to me with his belt hand and I took a trembly step forward in the hall.

And lo.

I felt a certain something. It was something that I had never felt before. And, as such, it was something that I did not entirely understand at first. My initial thought was that it had snowed in the hall, but that someone had painted the snow. And I’ll tell you for why this was.

It was because, as I took that trembly and tentative step forward into the hall, I felt something soft beneath my feet. Where before, and for ever before, there had been bare floorboards, now there was a certain softness all in green.

‘Carpet,’ I said, in the voice of one exalted. ‘Praise baby Jesus, Mother, a miracle – we have a fitted carpet.’

‘And not just in the hall -’ my mother now raised her voice also ‘- but all through our poor but honest little home.’

‘All through…’ and my voice tailed off. All through? Picture that! At this time in my life I could not. And so I must have fainted. Dead away.

I awoke to find myself supported by my mother’s arms, upon the Persian pouffe beside the fire. I awoke with a start and then with a cough, for thick smoke appeared to fill the room.

‘Don’t trouble yourself about the smoke,’ said my mother, once she had teased me into full consciousness with a Bourbon biscuit dipped in sal volatile. ‘It’s only the offcuts burning in the grate. They haven’t proved themselves to be a particularly good substitute for coal. I think I will discontinue their use as soon as I run out of them.’

‘Offcuts?’ I said. And then, ‘carpet offcuts.’ And then I felt faint all over again. But I didn’t pass out again. Once wasn’t cool. Twice would really be taking the Mickey Mouse hat. And I didn’t want to do that.

I did a little squinting about and, true as true, we did have a carpet, too, right here in the sitting room. Same as the hall. Same green.

‘Billiard table green,’ I said.

‘Billiard table baize offcuts,’ said my mother. ‘The same as the stage clothes you are wearing. In fact, when you fainted in the hall we had a job finding you. You sort of blended into the carpet. As would a chameleon.’

‘Billiard table baize offcuts?’ I did a bit of gauging up and mental arithmetic. ‘I would say,’ I said, ‘that surely this front sitting room of ours would have a floor area roughly equivalent to at least three billiard tables. Surely these are very large offcuts.’

‘That is what the foreman said to your father,’ said my mother. ‘Before he sacked him, this afternoon.’

‘Sacked him?’ I said. ‘Oh dear, not again.’

‘No, he only sacked him the once.’ My mother was a stickler for detail.

My father was not in the room. For had he been, I very much doubt whether this conversation would have taken place.

‘Since you have known my father,’ I said to my mother as she now kindly mopped my fevered brow with a rum-soaked copy of Pirate Today,
[7]
‘how many different jobs do you think he has had?’

‘It depends on what you mean by “different”,’ said my mother. ‘Many have been in the same line of business.’

I nodded and I gave the matter thought. ‘With different employers, then,’ I said.

‘Goodness me,’ said my mother. ‘I have long ago lost count. But forty or so years from now you will be able to “Google” him on the “Internet”. You can find out all about him then.’

‘Google?’ I said. ‘Internet?’ I said also.

‘Sorry,’ said my mother. ‘I was just having one of my visions. I have been granted the gift of prophecy, you see, from Northfields Pentecostal Church. Captain Lynch is schooling me in the technique.’

‘I’ll just bet he is,’ I said. ‘And have you had any visions, or prophetic insights, regarding him? Such as him discovering a lost city of gold, or suchlike?’

My mother shook her head and said that no, she hadn’t.

‘I suppose Dad’ll be at home a lot now,’ I said, with a degree of dread, if not in my voice, then probably upon my face. ‘It always takes him a long time to find a new job.’

‘Research,’ said my mother. ‘So much research.’

‘Right,’ I said, recalling my father’s research. ‘He always researches the various strengths of alcohol in the local public house, but never takes a job there.’

‘Not in a single public house,’ said my mother, once more the stickler for detail. ‘He does his research in many different public houses. He’ll do so much research in one public house that the landlord will urge him to go elsewhere, lest he over-researches.’

‘Right,’ I said. With the same inflection I had put into the previous ‘right’.

‘But no,’ said my mother, now applying vinegar and brown paper to my forehead, for she had read in a nursery rhyme that this was a timeless remedy. ‘He won’t be researching in public houses because he already has a new job.’

‘Already?’ I said. ‘But he was only sacked this afternoon.’

‘I know,’ said my mother. ‘What a world we live in today and no mistake. It must be this Space Age that they are all talking about. But a man knocked upon the door earlier this evening and offered your father a new job. And he took it, right there and then.’

‘Well,’ I said. And, ‘Well indeed. No, hang about,’ I then said. ‘Dad mentioned a travelling salesman and a gatherer of the pure. He hasn’t got a job shovelling up dog shi-’

‘No, no, no,’ said my mother. ‘Something quite different – your father has been given a job as a roadie for a rock ’n’ roll band.’

‘What?’ I said. And I said it loudly, too.

‘A chap in dark glasses who looks a bit like your music teacher gave him the job. He’s going to be the roadie for a band called The Rolling Stones.’

‘What?’ said I. And even louder now.

‘But let’s not talk about your father,’ said my mother. ‘Tell me, Tyler, what was your really exciting news that you mentioned just before you fainted?’

The Saturday that followed the Friday evening that had been The Sumerian Kynges’ very first gig was much the same as any other at that time.

My father was doing some home improvements. He was papering our sitting-room walls with billiard table baize and Captain Lynch had taken my mother to the pictures, because there was a film on about Jesus that my father wasn’t particularly keen to see.

I got up, then went without breakfast because my mother had apparently left early for the pictures so as to be first in the queue. Then I watched my father’s increasingly abortive attempts to paper the sitting-room walls until I could control my laughter no longer and had to rush to the toilet and be sick.

Which made me feel even hungrier. So I did what all lads of my age did and went off to the Wimpy Bar for lunch.

Wimpy Bars were the latest thing. They were American and therefore cool. They served a variety of foodstuffs that had never before been served upon these shores. And there were ice-cream desserts with names like the Brown Derby and the Jamaican Longboat.

How fondly I remember those.

I once found a pound note blowing down the street, which I considered was surely a gift from God. And myself and Neil Garden-Partee tried to spend the lot at the Wimpy Bar. And we really tried. We had as many burgers (with fries, as the Wimpy Bar’s chips were called) as we could pack in, then we laid into the desserts. And the milkshakes.

But we only spent fifteen and sixpence, all told.

Which wouldn’t, nowadays, even buy you a cup of tea.

As I have lived my long and eventful life and watched the world falling to pieces all around me, I often think back to those more innocent days of the early nineteen-sixties.

A time when two young men, in the full flush of their youth, could not eat their way through one pound’s worth of Wimpy Bar grub.

And I feel grateful, somehow. Blessed.

That I hadn’t been born twenty years earlier and got myself killed in the war.

What goes around comes around, I suppose.

Like diseases.

And whilst we are on the subject of diseases, I have to admit that I caught my first one of the ‘social’ persuasion in an alleyway at the back of the Wimpy Bar.

But not on this particular day.

Because on this particular day I was still a virgin.

I wasn’t too phased about being a virgin. Most of my pals, I knew, were similarly so. Although most bragged otherwise.

Neil, I knew, was a virgin. The girls didn’t take to his goatee. And Rob, although a genius with a chat-up line, never seemed to pull. Toby, however, was another matter. Toby was a bit of an enigma and if all was to be believed, and it probably was, he had had his first sex while at junior school.

With the teacher.

And the teacher wasn’t a man.

Just in case you were wondering.

I took the Sixty-Five Bus from South Ealing to Ealing Broadway. My favourite clippie, the Jamaican lady with the very white teeth, wasn’t clippying on the bus upon this morning and so I had to pay the fare. The Jamaican lady with the very white teeth always took pity on the hang-dog expression that I wore and my tales of poverty and child abuse, and let me off without paying.

The evil harridan of an Irish woman who patrolled today’s bus cared nothing for my tragic plight and demanded I fork out my penny-halfpenny without further ado.

Which left me no option but to shout ‘stop that dog’ and leap from the bus at the next traffic lights.

And travel the rest of the way on foot.

So I had worked up a really healthy appetite by the time I got to the Wimpy Bar.

I could spend time describing the interior of the Wimpy Bar, but what would be the point? You either know what it looks like, or you don’t. So to speak.

Neil was already there. And so was Rob and they were sharing a chocolate-nut sundae, with extra nuts.

I seated myself in my favourite seat, yawned a bit and stretched and gave my young belly a bit of a rub. ‘Give us a spoonful of that,’ I said.

‘No,’ both Neil and Rob agreed.

And I had to order my own.

‘Why do we always have the dessert first?’ I asked as I tucked into it. ‘Surely one should have the main course first.’

‘I’m sure one should,’ said Rob. And he chuckled.

‘Are you chuckling at me?’ I asked him, pointing with my spoon.

‘Yes,’ said Rob. ‘I am. Do you want to make something of it?’

‘Do you want a fight?’ I asked him. ‘And if so, why?’

‘Why?’ said Rob. ‘Why? You know why.’

‘I don’t,’ I said. And I noticed Neil moving the chocolate-nut sundae that he had been sharing with Rob somewhat closer to himself.

‘What is this all about?’ I asked of Rob. ‘What have I done to you?’

‘You signed me up to something with a maniac,’ said Rob. ‘While I was out cold. And what was that about? What happened to me last night?’

‘You came over a little queer,’ I said, hoping to lighten the situation with a cheeky little double entendre.

‘Outside,’ said Rob, rising from his chair.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No. My dessert will melt. Or Neil will eat it.’

‘Are you having a go at me now?’ asked Neil, rising also.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No. I’m not having a go at anyone. And I’m not fighting anyone. We’re friends. Aren’t we?’

‘Something weird happened last night,’ said Rob, who was showing no signs of sitting down again. ‘It was before ten, then suddenly it was midnight.’

‘I noticed that,’ I said.

‘Shut up!’ said Rob.

‘But I-’

‘There was something weird,’ said Neil. ‘My watch stopped at midnight and my watch never stops. It’s an Ingersoll and I wind it religiously.’

‘What, in church?’ I asked.

‘I will hit you,’ Neil said in ready reply.

‘Oh, come on, lads,’ I said and I raised calming open hands to them. ‘We’re friends – we shouldn’t be behaving like this. And we’ll get thrown out of here. And that won’t be cool.’

Rob made serious fists. And he shook them at me. And then he sat down.

‘That’s better,’ I said. And I sat down. ‘And you, Neil,’ I said. And Neil sat down and I felt better.

Though they both now glared at me.

‘I don’t understand this,’ I said. ‘Why are you so angry? And why are you so angry at me? We all signed Mr Ishmael’s contract.’

‘You moved my hand,’ growled Rob.

‘We all moved it,’ I said. ‘Not just me.’

Rob made a more than furious face. ‘And you didn’t know anything about this madman. He turns up unannounced, a total stranger, and you sign us all away, to what?’

‘To fame and fortune,’ I said. ‘It was the chance of a lifetime. We would have been stupid to have passed it up.’

‘And do you have a copy of this contract onto which you forged my signature?’

‘Not as such,’ I said. Carefully.

‘Not at all,’ said Neil.

‘And do you have this Mr Ishmael’s address?’

‘I think he said he’d contact us,’ I said. ‘That was what he said, wasn’t it, Neil?’

Neil shrugged, and ate as he shrugged.

‘It will all be okay,’ I said to Rob. ‘We will all be famous. We will all be millionaires.’

‘We’ll never see him again,’ said Rob. ‘You have signed away our very souls. I just know it. I can feel it. In my water, like my mum says.’

‘Don’t be so melodramatic,’ I said. ‘Signed away our very souls. Don’t be so silly.’

And then Toby entered the Wimpy Bar. And he looked most chipper, did Toby.

‘Morning, chaps,’ said Toby, seating himself next to me and drawing my chocolate-nut sundae in his direction. ‘All tickety-boo, as it were?’

‘No,’ said Rob. ‘Anything but.’

‘Sorry to hear that,’ said Toby. ‘I’ve just been with Mr Ishmael. He dropped me here in his limo.’

We all said, ‘What?’ As one.

‘We’ve been at Jim Marshall’s shop in Hanwell, checking out guitars and amps and speakers.’

‘There,’ I said to Rob. ‘I told you there was nothing to worry about.’

‘Well, there is for Rob,’ said Toby.

‘What?’ said Rob. On his own this time.

‘Mr Ishmael doesn’t want you in the band. He says that you are a disruptive influence. And as you clearly suffer from stage fright, what with you fainting last night and everything, you’d never be able to handle the strain of a forty-day transcontinental tour. So you’re sacked.’

‘I’m what?’

‘So all’s well that ends well, eh?’ I said to Rob, raising my sundae glass as if in toast.

And Rob punched me hard.

Right in the face.

And we didn’t see too much of Rob for a while after that. He kept to himself at school and didn’t come to any band practices.

But then he wouldn’t have done, would he, because he was not in the band any more.

But then we didn’t attend any band practices either. Mr Jenner had gone missing and with him the school ukuleles.

And Mr Ishmael seemed to have gone missing also, because we didn’t see anything of him, or our promised instruments.

Which was a bit of a shame.

And time passed by.

And then one Monday morning, the first of the summer holidays, there was a tap-tap-tapping at our front door. And my mother went off to answer it. I was eating my breakfast like a good boy and ignoring Andy, my brother, who was under the table pretending to be a tiger (for reasons of his own that I have no wish to go into here). And as my father was off on tour with The Rolling Stones, it was my mum who had to answer the door.

Which explains that.

And she hadn’t been gone for more than a moment before she returned and said, ‘It’s for you, Tyler – the postman, and he has a parcel for you.’

‘A parcel for me?’ And my mind did somersaults. I had over the years, and unbeknown to my parents, or my brother, saved up my pocket money and then sent it off. A bit at a time. Many times, for many things.

Things that I’d read about in American comics. Things that I coveted.

Wonderful things. Such as huge collections of toy soldiers that came complete with a foot-locker. Whatever that was. And the bike that you got free (an American bike with a sort of humpbacked crossbar) when you sold ‘Grit’. And a course in Dimac, the deadliest martial art of them all, sent to you personally by Count Dante, the deadliest man on Earth. And there were X-ray spectacles, which enabled you to see beneath girls’ clothes. And latex-rubber masks of Famous Monsters of Filmland. And a body-building course taught by a man named Charles Atlas.

I’d sent off for each and every one of these.

And had never received a single one.

And to this day I do not know why.

Perhaps it was because I never filled in my zip code on the order form that you cut from the comic-book page.

But here was the postman.

And he had a package for me!

Beneath the table I crossed my fingers and I hope, hope, hoped that it was the Dimac course. Because I so wished to brutally mutilate and disfigure with little more than a fingertip’s application. I withdrew my crossing fingers rapidly as my brother snapped at them with his tigery teeth.

‘Well, hurry up,’ said my mother. ‘The postman won’t wait. He’ll get behind schedule. And postmen would rather die than do that.’
[8]

I hastened from the table, down the greenly carpeted hall and to the front doorway, where stood the postman.

‘You have a package,’ I told him. ‘For me.’

‘Do indeed, squire,’ said the postman. ‘Sign here, if you please.’

And he proffered a paper upon a clipboard and I put his pen to this paper.

‘So where do you want it?’ the postman asked.

‘In my hand,’ I said in reply.

‘In his hand. He’s a caution, isn’t he, missus?’ These words were addressed to my mother, who was peering over my shoulder.

And not to my brother, who was peering between my legs and growling.

‘I don’t think I can fit it all in your hand,’ said the postman. And now he read from the paper on his clipboard.

‘Two Fender Stratocasters, in flight cases.

‘One Gibson EB-Three bass in flight case.

‘One set of Premier drums, consisting of twenty-inch bass drum, three graduated toms, snare, hi-hat cymbal, a sixteen-inch crash and a twenty-inch ride.

‘In flight cases.

‘Three Marshall two-hundred-and-fifty-watt amps.

‘Twelve Marshall AUT150HX speakers.

‘Five Marshall AUT160HX mega speakers…’

And the list went on.

And on and on.

And on and on some more.

And I came to the conclusion what a very good thing it was that myself and my fellow members of The Sumerian Kynges had done when we signed that contract.

In blood.

Down at the Southcross Roads School.

At midnight.