The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived (3 page)

‘No!
We shall
not
dine.’ The publisher crumpled
his cheroot into the ashbowl. ‘I have had enough of your extravagances, Rune.’

‘Mr
Rune,’ said Mr Rune. ‘And I know not of which extravagances you
speak.’

The
publisher sank back into his chair (same one, red leather), and took up
Mr
Rune’s
expense chitty for the month. It was a very substantial expense chitty. It ran
to twenty-three pages, closely typed. Leafing through he chose a random entry.

‘Toilet
paper,’ he said.

‘Toilet
paper?’ Rune buffed his watch chain with an oversized red, gingham hanky. ‘You
can hardly call toilet paper an expense.

‘Monogrammed
toilet paper?’

‘And
why should it not be so? Are you suggesting that toilet paper which has been
handmade in Japan from ground water iris, gladioli and tinted cotton flax,
scented with bergamot and sassafras, then individually crafted into the shape
of the sacred lotus, does not deserve to be monogrammed?’

‘You
have lotus-shaped toilet paper?’ The publisher’s jaw hung positively slack.

‘I am
Rune,’ quoth Rune. ‘I unscrew the inscrutable and ef at the ineffable. Do you
think that I should have my bottom wiped for me with some proprietary brand of
bog roll?’

‘Did
you say, have your bottom wiped for you?’

‘I find
your interest in my bodily functions beginning to border on the fetishistic,’
said Rune. ‘You’re not a member of the shirt-lifting fraternity, are you by any
chance?’

‘What?’
Mr Jackson-Five fell back in his chair. ‘How dare
you, sir!’ said he.

‘Sir
is
a bit more like it. And if you want to know, I
flush the poo-poo all away. Unlike my good chum the Dalai Lama, whose dung used
to be collected, dried, ground up and used as a sacramental host.’

‘It
never was.

‘It was
too.’
[3]

‘That
is disgusting.’

‘Not
nearly as disgusting as any one of a number of things I could call immediately
to mind.’

‘Enough,’
said Mr Jackson-Five, rising once more to his feet. ‘Enough, enough, enough. I
am a busy man. Kindly depart at once and furnish me with your finished
manuscript by no later than Friday. Goodbye.’

‘Sit
down,’ said Rune. ‘Sit down, answer your telephone, then write out my cheque.’

‘My
telephone is not ringing.’

‘But it
will. As surely as a fat lass with a cold sore will issue through your door at
any moment, to tell you that your car has been wheel-clamped.’

‘My car
is in the car-park. Goodbye, Mr Rune. Manuscript by Friday and no later.

‘Phone,’
said Rune and the telephone began to ring. ‘Sheer coincidence,’ said the
publisher. ‘Goodbye.’

‘Head
office,’ said Rune. ‘On the line, New York, the Managing Director. Urgent call,
you’d best pick it up.’

‘Nonsense.’
Mr Jackson-Five sat down and picked up the telephone receiver. ‘Hello,’ said
he.

Words
entered his ear via the transatlantic undersea cable link or the geo-stationary
satellite telecommunications jobbie, or some other unlikely piece of advanced
technological hocus-pocus.

‘Hello,
sir.’
Mr Jackson-Five sat up very straight in his seat. ‘Rune?
Mr
Rune,
yes. He’s with me now, sir. Do
what,
sir? But, sir, do you know how much
his expenses are this month? What? Money
no
object? But, sir … Yes,
yes, all right; at once, sir.’

‘Perk
up,’ said Hugo Rune as Mr Jackson-Five put down the phone and took out his
cheque-book. ‘No sign of the fat lass with the cold sore. Make that out for
cash, if you’d be so kind.’

‘You
would appear to have friends in very high places,’ said the publisher.

‘It
would appear that way, yes,’ replied Hugo Rune. ‘But now I must away. Are you
sure you will not join me for lunch?’

Mr
Jackson-Five shook his head. ‘The manuscript by Friday?’ he asked in a tone all
forlorn.

‘I will
have my private secretary fax it up from Skelington Bay.’

‘Taking
a little holiday then, are you?’ The bitter edge returned to the publisher’s
voice.

‘Rune
has no time for holidays. I am going there in connection with a project I am
currently engaged upon for the British government. Very hush-hush. Official
Secrets Act and all that kind of thing. Regret I cannot tell you more.’ Hugo
Rune tapped at his hawk’s-beak hooter.

‘Highly
classified.’

Jackson-Five
buried his face in his hands. ‘Go home, Mr Rune, go home.’

‘Via
the bank,’ said Rune, whisking his cheque from the publisher’s desk and folding
it into his beaver-skin wallet (a gift from Mae West). ‘Good-day to you.

‘Good-day.’

And
Hugo Rune took his leave.

Away across the water in
the city of New York, the Managing Director of Transglobe Publishing had
replaced the telephone receiver after his conversation with Mr Andrew
Jackson-Five.

Now he
sank back into the perfumed water of his marble bath-tub and sought once more
to compose the final mathematical equation which would complete his formula for
a universal panacea and elixir of life.

He was
a large man and amply proportioned, and the resemblance he bore to a certain Mr
Hugo Rune was so striking that one might have taken him, if not for an
identical twin, then to be none other than the self-same person.

But how
could this be?

For,
after all, here is Hugo Rune now, entering the lift at Transglobe’s British
headquarters. He is entering just as a fat lass with a cold sore is leaving it.
She is bound for the office of Mr Jackson-Five as it happens. And she has a sad
tale to relate — about how Mr Jackson-Five’s Mercedes had to be moved from the
car-park to make way for Mr Hugo Rune’s chauffeur-driven limousine. And how it
had not only been wheel-clamped in the High Street, but now towed away to boot.

Being
the great humanitarian he is, Hugo Rune will not be returning to the
publisher’s office to tell him, ‘I told you so.’

3

‘Ashes
to Ashes, funk to funky,’ said the Reverend Cheesefoot.

‘Dust
to Dust, you bastard.’ His lady wife tugged at his vestments and made that kind
of face that some wives do when they find their husbands stoned at quite the
wrong time of the day.
‘Dust
to
dust.’

‘Bless
you,’ said the reverend, squinting at his prayer-book. ‘Dust to dust it is
then.’

A warm,
spring sun breathed blessings upon Skelington Church, with its picturesque
Gothic bits and bobs, its topiarized yews, its fifteenth-century lich-gate, its
medieval brasses, and its
‘Kinky Vicar made love to my luggage,’
scandal
now running to its third week in the Sunday press.

The
lads of 3A, each now an avid reader of the Sunday press, were grouped untidily
about the open grave, where the coffin containing the mortal remains of Norman
the younger had come to take its final rest. It had come there by a rather
roundabout route from the church, but the lads had enjoyed the ramble. And it
was a nice day for it, at least.

Norman’s
dad, wheelchair-bound, with both legs in plaster, blubbed quietly into a
Kleenex tissue. Norman’s mum, who had run off with a double-glazing salesman
five years before and left no forwarding address, sat in a bungalow a good many
miles to the north, eating cheese biscuits and watching daytime television.

‘Dust
to Dusty Springfield,’ tittered the Reverend Cheesefoot. ‘Who giveth this woman
to be taken in matrimony? No, I’ve turned over two pages there.

‘Bit of
an old cliché, drunken vicars, aren’t they?’ whispered Boris Timms to Charlie
Huxley. ‘I have an uncle in the priesthood, you know. He can inflate his
stomach with helium and propel himself through the air by fa—’

‘I had
an uncle called Aldous,’ whispered Charlie. ‘And
he
really knew how to
get high.’

‘Shut
up, you two, and show some respect.’ Mr Bailey dealt Timms and Huxley blows to
the left earholes.

‘Man
that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is filled with muesli,’
went the lover of luggage.

‘Muesli’s
not bad,’ sniggered Timms. ‘And… ouch!’ he continued, as his right ear got
a clouting.

Rather
too near to the graveside for his own comfort, Teddy Bilson shuffled his big
feet, blew a dewdrop from the end of his nose and made snivelling sounds. ‘It’s
a crying shame, so it is,’ snivelled he. ‘A crying shame.’

‘Death
is a purely human concept,’ the Buddhist Blenkinsop consoled him. ‘You see
consciousness, being chemical in nature, changes as its chemistry changes. The
one merges into the all, the all into the one. Now, the Sufis say—’

‘Shut
it!’ Mr Bailey leaned forward to clout Blenkinsop in the ear. Blenkinsop,
however, ducked nimbly aside and Mr Bailey disappeared into the open grave.
Which is another thing you don’t see every day of the week.

‘The
Sufis say,’ continued Blenkinsop, ‘what goes around, comes around. Or something
so near as makes no odds at all.’

Seated upon a nearby
gravestone was a pale-looking youth. He was somewhat short for his height, but
old for his age. His hair was red and worn in a style that used to be known as
The
Beatle Cut.
He had those freckles that some people with red hair have, and
those unsqueezed spots that all teenage boys have. He wore a grey school
uniform and a puzzled expression.

His
name was Norman.

Norman
the younger.

‘Who is
that woman holding hands with my dad?’ he asked the lad in white, who stood
beside him, smirking like a good’n.

‘She’s
a librarian. She saved your dad’s life. Gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
In the nick of time.’

‘Him
but not
me?’

‘You
were too far gone, mate. Sorry.’

‘So
I’m… you know … I’m—’

‘Dead,
mate, yes. As dead as a, well, dead as a dead boy. Yeah.’

‘What a
bummer.’ Norman looked on as various mourners sought to hoist Mr Bailey from
the open grave. He was pleased to see that none of 3A was helping.

‘That
suitcase-shagger is making a right holy show of my funeral,’ said Norman. ‘I
might have hoped for a more dignified send-off.’

The lad
in white smirked on. ‘I thought it might give you a laugh,’ said he. ‘Cheer you
up a bit. Bereavement can be a very traumatic time for everyone concerned,
especially for the deceased.’

‘I
don’t feel particularly deceased. In fact, I don’t feel particularly much of
anything really. Are you sure there hasn’t been some mistake?’

‘No
mistake, mate. Take it from me, you look pretty dead from where I’m standing.’

‘What a
bummer.’ Norman looked on again and watched as the Reverend Cheesefoot, leaning
over to help Mr Bailey, received a kick in the trouser seat from his wife and
plunged in the grave on top of him.

‘Tell
you what,’ said the lad in white, ‘if you want to make absolutely sure, then go
over to your dad and wave your hands about in front of his face. And shout a
bit, if you like. He won’t be able to see or hear you. But some dead folk like
to do it. Get it out of their systems.’

‘Do you
think it would help?’ Norman asked.

‘Not in
the least. But it makes me laugh, I can tell you.’

‘Thanks
a lot.’ Norman tried to put his hands into his trouser pockets, but found that
he could not. ‘I seem to be somewhat transparent,’ he said dismally. ‘But who
are
you
anyway? Mr Jordan, is it, or the Angel Gabriel?’

‘Leave
it out,’ the lad in white made mirth. ‘I’m your PLC.’

‘Public
Limited Company?’

‘Post
Life Counsellor. It’s my job to be of comfort. To help you through your first
few difficult days of readjustment. You’ll find that being dead’s not so bad
once you’ve come to terms with it. You seem to be coming to terms with it
rather well already, as it happens.’

‘I’m
just putting on a brave face,’ said Norman. ‘I’m really pissed off inside. And
you’re not being any comfort at all, if it comes to that.’

‘Sorry,
mate. It’s my first time at doing this. They gave me a handbook, but you know
how it is.’

Norman
didn’t, but he said, ‘Yes, I know.’

‘Do you
want to stick around for the bit when Teddy Bilson falls into the grave and
puts his foot through your coffin lid, or shall we just shove off now?’

‘I
think we should just shove off now.’ Norman looked up at the clear blue sky,
then down at the grassy ground, then up to the face of the smirker in white.
And then Norman’s own face fell. ‘Shove off to
where?’
he managed.