The Brentford Chainstore Massacre (15 page)

Summer was coming to an end, and with it Jim’s stay in the Cottage Hospital. He was out of traction now and the plaster casts were off. There was still considerable stiffness, but he could walk all right with the aid of a stick.

Jim had not spent his time in idleness though. He had written a book. The Brentford Scrolls: My Part in Their Discovery.

Well, it had started out with that title anyway. But Jim had favoured later excesses, Raiders of the Lost Scrolls, Scrollrunner, and finally, for no apparent reason, other than it sounded good, The Brentford Chainstore Massacre.

Although purporting to be a strictly factual autobiographical account, few who knew Jim personally would have recognized the lantern-jawed, hardbitten, Dimac-fighting sex machine hero with the devastating wit and the taste for fine wines and pussy-magnet Porsches.

Jim had sent off copies to several major publishers, but was still awaiting replies. He had not sent a copy to Transglobe. He had quite given up on the time travelling, even though he’d had plenty of time to perfect it. He could only go back. And back didn’t seem to be a joyful place to go.

During Jim’s months of hospital incarceration, John had made many visits, and Jim had been forced to listen to the Irishman’s vivid accounts of great fund-raising ventures. Of whist drives and raffles and pub quiz competitions, of wet T-shirt contests (there seemed to have been many of these) and of guided tours and sponsorship deals. But the millions were as far away as ever, as were too the thousands and the hundreds.

“I have so many expenses,” John told him.

Jim plodded homeward on his stick. The trees in the Memorial Park were taking on their autumn hues, and Autumn Hughes the gardener was sweeping up some leaves. The sun was sinking low now and the air had a bit of a nip to it. Thoughts of a nip turned Jim’s thoughts to the Swan. And the optimist in him put what spring it could into his plod.

When Jim reached the Swan, however, the optimist went back to sleep.

A large neon cross blinked on and off and the sign of the Flying Swan no longer swung. The Road to Calvary, spelled out in coloured lights, flashed red, then amber, green, then red again.

Jim offered up a prayer, hung down his head and plodded on.

He settled himself onto the new bench before the Memorial Library. But the new bench, being built entirely from concrete, was uncomfortable. Jim offered up another prayer, hung his head lower still and plodded home.

He turned the familiar key in the familiar lock and sought sanctuary. There were no letters of acceptance from publishers to greet him on the mat; the house smelled damp and dead. Jim sighed. The optimist in him was now in coma.

Jim closed the door and put on the safety chain. A lesser man than he might well have plugged up the gaps and turned on the gas at a time like this, but not Jim. Jim had no change for the meter.

He was just about to turn from the door when he heard the first click. It wasn’t loud but, as all else was silent, it was loud enough.

The second click was louder. It was a very distinctive click, the sort of click which, had it been able to speak instead of just click, would have said, “I am the click made by a gun being cocked.”

And then there was the third click, very loud indeed.

And then the bright, bright light.

Jim pressed back against the door. “My dear God, no,” he cried.

And then came the noise.

A screaming, shouting, yelling noise.

“Surprise!” screamed Celia Penn.

“Welcome home!” shouted John Omally.

“Happy homecoming!” yelled Norman Hartnell.

Jim stood and stared as the hall about him filled. Professor Slocombe was there, and Old Pete and Small Dave and three young women from the windscreen wiper works (one of whom Jim had always fancied) and Sandra the shot-putting lesbian uniped. And there was the lady in the straw hat and her friend Doris and the medical student named Paul who knew all about the blues. And there was someone else and someone else and even someone else. But these folk were still in the kitchen as you really couldn’t get that many people into Jim’s hall. Mind you, you could never have got nearly fifty people into Professor Slocombe’s study, but as that seemed to have slipped by unnoticed we’ll say no more about it.

“Hip hip hoorah!” went those in the hall. And those in the kitchen. And others still in the front room. The couple making love in Jim’s bed would probably say it later.

“Welcome home, old friend,” said John Omally, wringing Jim’s hand between his own.

Jim tried to speak, but he just couldn’t. There was a big lump in his throat and a tear in each of his eyes.

“For he’s a jolly good fellow,” sang the assembled multitude, as John led Jim towards the kitchen and a drink.

Now, as we all know, there are parties, and then there are PARTIES!

At parties, you stand around sipping sherry and making polite conversation with doctors and dentists and architects and women with severe haircuts and halitosis. But at PARTIES! – at PARTIES! you do things differently.

At PARTIES! there is a fight in the front garden, someone being sick in the wardrobe, a couple making love in the host’s bed (you see, Jim’s had already got off to a good start). There’s a bloke who climbs onto the roof and moons at the moon, there’s another so well and truly out of it that he tries to tunnel under the garden fence, convinced he’s escaping from a prison camp. There are discussions about seemingly ordinary matters that turn into great Zen mind-boggling mystical all-encompassing trips into cosmic infinity, which sadly will never be remembered in the morning. There are ugly women who become tantalizingly beautiful as the night wears on. And ugly men who do not. There is laughter, there is gaiety. There are several visits from the police about turning down the noise. And if you’re really lucky there’s a woman who takes off all her clothes and dances on the kitchen table. And if you’re really, really, really lucky you might just get to meet a blonde choreographer with amber eyes and a fascinating mouth and

“Nice PARTY, Jim,” said a blonde choreographer with amber eyes and a fascinating mouth.

“Who is that?” whispered Jim, as the beauty vanished into the crowd.

“Oh, forget her,” said John. “She’s with her uncle Rob.”

“This is some PARTY though, John. Thank you very much.”

“Well, I couldn’t let you come home to an empty house. Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

The lady with the straw hat said “Cheers” also, and then she said, “That Old Pete bloke is up on your roof mooning at the moon.”

“Magic,” said John. “Having offended almost everyone on Earth he is now turning his attention to the cosmos.”

“Cheers,” said Jim.

“There’s some policemen outside,” said Small Dave. “They’ve come about the music.”

“There isn’t any music,” said Jim.

“That’s what they said, so they’ve lent us this ghetto-blaster.”

“Magic,” said John, hoisting it onto the unspeakable kitchen worktop and plugging it into the socket.

Howl, shriek and scream.

“It’s the Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of Death,” shouted Jim above the cacophony. “They’re beginning to grow on me.”

Professor Slocombe stuck his head round the kitchen door. “There’s some policemen outside,” he shouted. “They say to turn the noise down.”

“Magic,” said John Omally, turning it down by the merest fraction.

In Jim’s back garden, a chap who was well and truly out of it tried to tunnel under the fence. Upstairs someone was being sick into Jim’s wardrobe.

“Couldn’t you do that somewhere else?” asked the couple who were making love in Jim’s bed. It was a different couple.

“You know, John,” said Jim, as John topped up his glass from the dangerous blue vodka bottle, “you’re a good friend to me.”

John consulted his naked wrist. “It’s a bit early in the evening for that kind of talk, isn’t it?”

“Yes, you’re right. Dare I ask how the fund-raising is going?”

“So-so,” said John, making the so-so gesture.

“Hm,” said Jim. “Well, cheers anyway.”

And John topped up his glass. “I think I’ll go and see if I can find that blonde choreographer,” he said, turning up the ghetto-blaster.

“Go with God, my friend,” called Jim. And Jim lounged back against his unspeakable worktop, a glass of dangerous blue vodka in his hand, and the Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of Death playing havoc with his inner ears. In the front garden two men fought goodnaturedly and all seemed once more right to Jim with Brentford and the world.

“So God and St Peter are playing golf,” said Old Pete, now down from the roof and in the front room, “and St Peter’s winning. And God takes a swing at the ball and slices it into the rough and this rabbit picks it up in its mouth and races across the fairway, and then out of the sky plunges this eagle and it picks the rabbit up in its talons and soars away into the blue and the next thing this hunter shoots the eagle and the eagle plummets dropping the rabbit and the ball rolls out of the rabbit’s mouth and straight into the hole. And St Peter looks at God and says ‘Do you want to play golf or just fuck about?’” Two West London Wandering Bishops who had happened by laughed uproariously at this. A woman with a severe haircut and halitosis, who was at the wrong party, said, “Surely that joke is in very bad taste.”

“Shall I goose her, or will you?” Old Pete asked the bishops.

“Now crop circles,” said Paul the medical student, toking on a joint of Cheech and Chong proportions. “Crop circles are the stigmata of the Corn God. A visual expression of the agonies of the landscape’s Passion, brought on through modern day man’s rape of the natural world. Agrichemicals, intensive farming, the land cries out in sorrow and pain. But will anyone listen? Will they?”

“Don’t Bogart that joint,” said the lady in the straw hat, snatching it away.

“Anybody here got an acoustic guitar?” asked Paul.

“No!” shouted all within earshot, and those out of earshot also. And Paul was hustled from the party and flung into the street. Acoustic guitar indeed!

“Huh,” said Paul, “and I can do ‘Blowing in the Wind’ without even looking at my fingers.”

“And stay out!”

A well and truly out of it chap ran by shrieking, “Free, I’m free!”

“Would you like to dance, Jim?” asked the blonde choreographer with the amber eyes and the fascinating mouth.

“Yes I would,” said Jim. “It’s Suzy, isn’t it?”

“That’s right, but how did you know my name?” Jim took her most politely in his arms and, as the Hollow Chocolate Bunnies (right on cue) went into a slow and smoochy number, began that slow and dreamy turning round in circles dance that people such as Jim who can’t otherwise dance at all always seem to be able to do when holding on to someone really wonderful.

“What were you saying?” asked Jim, who even through the haze of cigarette smoke could smell the beauty’s hair.

“I said, how did you know my name?”

“Ah yes. Well, very odd thing. Someone put this hallucinogenic drug onto a council table and I got some on my fingers and started tripping. And I hallucinated you.”

“Was it a good trip, or a bad trip?”

“Oh, a good trip,” said Jim. “A very good trip.”

“You can hold me a little closer, if you want.”

“Oh. Yes please.”

“You are a very beautiful woman,” said John Omally. The very ugly woman he was dancing with laughed in a manner that was not unknown to Sid James.

“Now your standard engine,” said Paul, who had crawled back in through a hole beneath Jim’s back fence, “your standard warp-drive engine, functions through the ionization of beta particles creating a positronic catalyst, which bombards the isotope with gamma radiation, giving rise to galvanic variations and the transperambulation of pseudo-cosmic antimatter.”

“I only asked you what the time was,” said a young woman from the windscreen wiper works. “And you start coming out with all this Zen mind-boggling mystical all-encompassing trip into cosmic infinity.”

“That’s all right,” said Paul. “We’ll never remember it in the morning.”

“And then I fell into the hole and broke both my legs,” said Jim.

“Incredible,” said Suzy. “And do you still have the Porsche?”

The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies thrashed back into Death Metal, and two police officers instantly knocked on the front door. “Turn that bloody noise down,” they said. Upstairs someone else was sick in Jim’s wardrobe and yet another couple who were making love told him to do it elsewhere.

“You are a very beautiful woman,” said John Omally. “Leave it out,” said Old Pete.

By three o’clock in the morning the PARTY began to thin. But this was three o’clock in the morning of the PARTY’S second day, so no one felt too embarrassed about that.

Paul strummed upon an acoustic guitar, but it was after three in the morning and he was strumming the blues (in A minor), so that was permissible.

Professor Slocombe had long said his goodbyes and left with two of the young women from the windscreen wiper works. These would later know such exquisite pleasure as to leave them smiling for a week.

Old Pete was asleep in the shed. And the lady in the straw hat was asleep on the sofa with Suzy’s uncle Rob.

Suzy and Jim were nowhere to be seen.

John Omally awoke in Jim’s bed to find himself gazing into a face that looked like a bag of spanners. “Oh dear,” said John. “Oh dear, oh dear.”

Suzy and Jim sat upon the canal bridge staring down into the moonlit waters.

“You could have made love to me, you know,” said Suzy.

“I know,” said Jim. “But actually I couldn’t. I never can the first time and often not even the second or the third. It puts a lot of women off. But it’s the way I am. Too emotional, I suppose.”

“You’re a good man, Jim. I like you very much.”

“And you’re a very beautiful woman.”

Suzy flicked a pebble into the canal waters. “What do you want to do with your life, Jim?” she asked.

“Just experience it, I suppose. When I was young I promised myself that I would experience everything I could. Travel the world, see exotic places, take it all in. As much as I could, before time ran out.”

“So, what stopped you?”

“What stops any of us? Habit, I suppose. You get into habits. They’re hard to break away from. But what about you? What do you want to do with your life?”

“Something wonderful,” said Suzy. “I think something wonderful is about to happen. I can feel it in the air. Can’t you?”

Jim put his arm about the beautiful woman’s shoulder and gazed into the stunning amber eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Oh yes, I can.”

The sun rose slowly from behind the windscreen wiper works and two young women crossed the bridge. Both were smiling broadly.

Jim took Suzy in his arms and kissed her fascinating mouth. “I hope I’ll see you again,” he said.

“You will,” said Suzy.

John and Jim munched upon egg and bacon at the Plume Cafe.

“I thought I might find you here,” said John, thrusting buttered toast into his mouth. “There’s no food left at your place.”

“You look a little, how shall I put this, shagged out, John.”

“I barely escaped with my life. If the woman hadn’t tripped over this bloke who was being sick in your wardrobe, I don’t think I would have made it.”

“I suppose a wardrobe full of vomit is not too high a price to pay.”

“Someone set fire to your shed. Old Pete, I think.”

“It was only a shed.”

“Sorry about the front windows. The lady in the straw hat woke up and threw Paul out through them. Something to do with key changes, I believe.”

“Windows can be replaced.”

“A cruise missile then demolished the entire house.”

“Such is life,” said Jim.

“Jim, you’re not really paying attention to me, are you?”

“Yes I am.”

“No you’re not. You’ve gone all vacant.”

“No I haven’t.”

“Then why are you stirring your tea with your toast? And you’re glowing, Jim. You have a definite glow on. You’re not…”

“I am,” said Jim. “I’m in love.”

“No, no, no.” John shook his head fiercely. “You don’t want to be in love. You really don’t.”

“I do, John. I really do.”

“No, trust me, you don’t. Love is… well, love is – love is marriage, Jim, marriage and babies and a mortgage and not going out with your mates and having Sunday lunch at home instead of the pub and it’s mowing the lawn, Jim, and cleaning the car and having respectable friends round for dinner parties and…”

“Turn it up, mate,” said a married man at the next table. “We all know what it’s like, don’t rub it in.”

“Marriage doesn’t have to be like that,” said Jim. “Not if you’re married to your best friend.”

“I’m not marrying you, Jim.”

“No,” said Jim. “You’re not.”

“But I’m your best friend.”

“I used to have a best friend,” said the married man wistfully. “My wife soon put a stop to that.”

“Listen to him, Jim. The man knows what he’s talking about.”

“John, I’m in love. I can’t help it. I don’t have any control over it. I’ve fallen in love.”

“No.” John shook his head once more. “No, Jim, no, Jim, no.”

“I’m sorry, John, but there it is.”

“Another best friend gone,” said the married man. “What a tragedy.”

“Quite right,” said John. “Listen to this poor wretch, Jim. You don’t want to end up like him.”

“Steady on,” said the poor wretch.

“Ground down, henpecked, under the thumb.”

“I said steady on!”

“A shadow of his former self, doomed to hoovering and babysitting, while the wife goes out to her story circle and…”

“I said steady on and I meant it.”

“See that? Hair-trigger temper, brought on by too many nights of walking the baby up and down while his wife snores away in her hairnet.”

“Right, that does it.” The married man had possibly been quite an accurate puncher in his youth, before he got all ground down and henpecked and under the thumb. He took a mighty swing at John.

And he hit Jim right on the nose.

Jim went down amidst tumbling crockery, two eggs, bacon, sausage, a fried slice and half a cup of tea with a bit of toast in it.

“Fight!” shouted the lady in the straw hat, who was just coming in.

John brought down the married man, but also two of his colleagues. These were unmarried men and still quite useful with their fists. They set about John with a vim and vigour most unexpected for that time of day.

Jim struggled to his feet and leapt into the fray to aid the man who was still his best friend. Further tables were overturned and others joined in the melee.

Lily Marlene, who ran the Plume, issued from the kitchen, her mighty mammaries sailing before her. As a married woman she knew exactly how to deal with men. She laid about her with a wok spoon.

“This is the kind of stuff I like,” said the lady in the straw hat, seating herself at a respectable distance from the fighting. “I’ve just come from this PARTY. It was pretty crap until the stove blew up.”

“My stove blew up?” Jim raised his head from the fighting.

“Your mate there did it. Said he knew this trick with an unopened can of beans.”

“What?” But Jim got hit by an unmarried man and went down again.

“What exactly are they fighting about?” the lady asked Lily Marlene.

“Marriage,” said Lily.

“Bastards!” said the lady, taking off her hat and wading in.

The police got there in remarkably good time. They were just passing by, as it happened, on their way to investigate a report of an explosion that had blown a kitchen wall down. They whipped out the electric truncheons and did what had to be done.

“That does it,” said Jim. “That absolutely and utterly does it.”

“What does it do?” John asked.

Jim made a very bitter face. “Just tell me where we are,” he said.

“We’re in a police cell,” said John. “But look on the bright side.”

“There isn’t any bright side. And look at me. Look at me.”

“You’ll heal. It’s not too bad.”

“I’ve got a black eye and a fat lip and…”

“Don’t go on about it. I’m hurt too.”

“There’s not a mark on you.”

“I’m hurting inside.”

“You lying bastard.”

“Language,” said John.

“Don’t you language me. This is all your fault.”

“It’s not my fault. You started it with all your talk about falling in love.”

“I never did. You wound up that married bloke.”

“And that’s just how you would have ended up. You’ve learned a summary lesson there, Jim. You should thank me for it.”

“What? What?”

“Love and marriage, they’re all very well for some people. Ordinary people. But not for the likes of us.”

“But we are ordinary people, John.”

“We are not. We are John and Jim. We are individuals.”

“I’ve had enough,” said Jim. “If I hadn’t had enough before, then I have certainly had enough now. This is the end, John. Our partnership is dissolved. Our friendship is dissolved. When we get out of here I never, ever, want to see you again.”

“Come off it, Jim. Don’t say such things.”

“You blew my kitchen up.”

“I was just trying to make breakfast. You didn’t have a tin opener.”

“That is quite absurd.”

“Yes, sorry, I know. It was a bit of a laugh.”

“It’s all a bit of a laugh to you, John. Everything. Do it for the crack, eh? Let’s go for it, Jim. Well, I’ve had enough. I quit.”

“You’re just a tad overwrought.”

Jim raised his fist and shook it. “John, I am in love, and I do not need you any more.”

There was a terrible silence.

“You don’t mean that,” said John. “You can’t.”

“I do. And I can.”

“She’s married,” said John.

“What? Who?”

“Suzy. She’s married.”

“She never is. You’re lying.”

“I’m not, Jim. That uncle Rob isn’t her uncle. He’s her husband.”

“But she called him uncle Rob.”

“It’s some kind of pet name. Married people do that.”

“People in love do that,” said Jim and he sat down upon the bunk beside John.

“I’m sorry,” said John. “But there it is.”

“It’s not.” Jim jumped up. “You’re lying, John. I can hear it in your voice.”

“All right, Jim, yes, I’m lying. But I’m lying to save our friendship.”

“That was a low-down filthy rotten trick.”

“Desperate men do desperate things.”

Jim sat down upon the bed once more. “I’m desperately in love,” he said.

“I know. And I won’t stand in the way. But we will stay friends, won’t we? Best friends?”

“Yeah,” said Jim, extending his hand. “Put it there.”

“Yeah,” said Jim, extending his hand. “Put it there.”

John put it there.

With his free hand Jim hit him right in the mouth. “That’s for blowing up my kitchen and lying to me,” he said.