Web Site Story (4 page)

'Splendid. Well Derek here will show you where the tea things are and you can make us all one.'

Kelly Anna shook her head. 'I don't make tea,' she said.

'Well, never mind. We have coffee.'

'Nor coffee.' Kelly Anna shook her head. It was a definite bit of head-shaking. It signified that she definitely didn't make either tea or coffee. Definitely, absolutely, not.

'Ah,' said the editor. 'Ah, well indeed.'

Kelly Anna gave the office a thorough looking-over. It was not a thing of great beauty to behold and she beheld it with distaste.

Beside the window stood the editor's desk, with.the editor behind it. The editor and the editor's desk both looked most untidy. The editor was shabbily dressed in the ruins of a once tweed suit. The desk was a mayhem of papers and books and paper cups and ashtrays and old-fashioned telephones, mostly off the hook. There were pictures on the walls, group shots, framed front pages, yellow with age. And these hung at angles just untrue enough to annoy the fastidious. The carpet "was grey and bare of thread. Filing cabinets were open and most looked empty within.

'Has there been a robbery?' asked Kelly Anna Sirjan.

'Sorry? What?' The editor glanced all around.

'A robbery,' said Kelly. 'Perhaps someone broke in to steal those unpacked boxes of Mute Corp computer parts. Perhaps they were disturbed during the process and only managed to ransack the office.'

'You are a very rude young woman,' said the editor. 'Dismiss all thoughts of having sex with me.'

The only tidy thing resident to the office made a ghastly swallowing sound and said, 'Please forgive Mr Shields. He's been under a lot of pressure recently. My name is Derek and I am the
Mercury's
features editor. Can / get you a cup of tea?'

Kelly Anna looked at Derek and nodded her golden head. Derek wore a neat grey suit with a pressed white collarless shirt. He was young and tall and slim and handsome with short black hair and emerald eyes. And those eyes looked her full in the face and never once strayed to her breasts.

'Thank you Derek,' said Kelly Anna Sirjan. 'Lady Grey, without sugar.'

'Lady Grey, right.' Derek chewed his bottom lip. 'I might have to send out for that.'

'Well, whatever you have will be fine.'

'Fine. Then if you'll follow me, I'll show you around the building on the way.'

Derek led Kelly Anna from the office and closed the door behind him. The editor sat and fumed at his desk and made a very fierce face.

The face of Periwig Tombs was smiling sweetly. The tour bus was passing the allotments now and Big Bob Charker was singing the praises of Brentford's horti-culturalists.

'Twenty-three different varieties of tomato,' Big Bob said into the microphone. 'Twenty-three different varieties of sprout. And the mighty oak trees at the riverside end are the natural habitat of the lesser spotted grebe and the piebald finch chuck-chuck fiddledum bird.'

'Eh?' went Periwig as he swung the wheel. But his brain was roaring forward.
Take a safari through the wildlife
sanctuary and rare bird reserve of Allotment World. Enjoy a sprout and grebe burger at Periwigs, the exclusive allotment
eatery.

'Big bare-bottomed bumbly bees,' said the voice of Big Bob Charker. 'Busy busy bumble bees and Walter the Wasp as well.'

'Waspish,' said Kelly Anna Sirjan. 'Waspish, ill-mannered and clearly a misogynist.'

She sat opposite Derek at a window table in the Plume Cafe. The Plume Cafe sat at the top end of the High Street. The Plume Cafe boasted twenty-two different varieties of tea. None of which contained any sprout.

'I thought you'd like it better here than in the staff canteen,' said Derek.

'You mean that cupboard.'

'The staff canteen cupboard, yes. How's the tea?'

Kelly Anna Sirjan sipped her Lady Grey. 'Remarkably good, actually. The filtered water makes all the difference.'

'There's not much you can't get in Brentford if you know where to look.'

'I was talking about your boss, Mr Shields,' said Kelly Anna Sirjan.

'Yes, I know you were.' Derek sipped at his Typhoo. 'He's not a bad man. He's rather fierce and I agree he's something of a misogynist. But I'm afraid that he fears what you might do to the paper.'

'He should fear for his job,' said Kelly. 'Speaking to a complete stranger in the way that he did.'

'He has the job for life. It's written into his contract.'

'Only in Brentford,' said Kelly.

'Yes, you're right about that.'

'But he has nothing to fear from me anyway. I'm not here to change anything. I'm just here to study.'

'You want to learn how the paper's run? There's really not much to it.'

Kelly Anna plucked at her hair and turned smooth strands between her fingers. Backwards, forwards, backwards. 'It's not the paper,' she said. 'It's the town itself. I'm writing a thesis on it for my doctorate. I'm doing an MA in socio-economics. I approached the newspaper publisher at their head office. Told them about the project I had in mind. They put up the finance and arranged for me to come and work at the
Brentford Mercury
for three weeks. Mostly I just want to study the archives, learn about the history of the borough. I'm fascinated by the way that it appears to co-exist with the other boroughs surrounding it, yet remains curiously isolated and insular. I'm seeking to build up a general framework on which to hang my thesis.'

'Oh,' said Derek. 'Then Mr Shields has got it all wrong. He thought that you were some kind of troubleshooter from head office sent to shake up the place.'

'That's what head office would like me to do, but I don't want to cause any trouble. You can tell Mr Shields that I won't cause him any trouble.’

Derek smiled, exposing a set of perfect pearly-white teeth. 'Would you mind terribly if I didn't?' he said. 'I've worked at the
Mercury
for nearly two years now and he's shouted at me on every single day of them. It's been a real pleasure to watch him squirm, I'd like to enjoy it for just a little longer.'

Kelly raised an eyebrow. 'You're a naughty boy,' she said.

'Naughty bus,' said Periwig Tombs, struggling with the handbrake. 'I oiled you this morning, don't you get stuck on me now.'

The tour bus was parked at the western tip of the baseline of the Great Brentford Triangle.

'It is popularly believed', came the voice of Big Bob through the speaker system, 'that the city of Manchester has more canals in it than does Venice. This is.not altogether true, although we do have the world's most famous football team. Man U.'

'Eh?' went Periwig Tombs and he turned his head and slid back the little glass panel behind the driver's seat. 'Oi, Bob,' he called, along the deserted lower deck of the bus. 'Have you gone stone bonkers or something? What's all this toot about Man U?'

Big Bob's big head popped out from that special place where the bus conductors stand. 'Eee-up, bonny lad,' said he. And 'Eee-up, bonny lad' came out of the speakers.

'Eee-up, bonny lad?' shouted Periwig Tombs. 'That's not Manchester, that's Geordie, isn't it? Have you been drinking, or what?'

'Ding, ding,' went Big Bob. 'Hold very tight please.'

'You
have
been drinking!' shouted Periwig. 'You've been at the giggly pops.'

'Pardon I?' said Big Bob Charker. 'Giggly pops? What are those?'

'Piggly pops. Bimbo bubbly pops, damn me, I've forgotten how to speak.'

'Who are you?' asked Big Bob, suddenly. 'What are you doing in my front room?'

'He's lost it!' Periwig Tombs slammed shut the glass shutter and got into a bit of a sweat. 'He's gone mad. He's lost his lollipops, fan belts, no not those. What's happening? I'm getting out of here.'

Periwig did revvings of the engine and then stared out of the windscreen. 'Where am I?' he said. 'I don't recognize this place. I'm lost. The bus is lost.'

There came a dreadful rattling and banging at the shut glass shutter. Periwig ducked his head.

'Where are we?' shouted Big Bob Charker. He didn't have the mic any more. 'Get us back to Bren…' he paused. 'To Brentham, no to Brentside, no to Brenda, no to help! I'm lost! We're all lost. The bus is lost, help, help, help!'

Periwig Tombs stuck his foot down. He didn't know what was going on. What was happening to him or what was happening to Big Bob. But he suddenly felt very very afraid. Outside all the world was strange. The shops and houses, the lorries and cars. All were suddenly alien. Suddenly strange and unknown. His powers of recognition were blanking off. A car was a car and then it was not. Then it was just an odd-coloured shape. The road ahead was tarmac no more, now it was only grey matter.

'Aggh!' Periwig Tombs took his foot off the clutch. The bus was parked in second gear. The handbrake stretched and snapped and the old bus rumbled forward.

'What's this?' went Periwig, regarding the steering wheel in his hands. 'Black thing, coiled round? Spade? Spode? Snail? Snake?
Snake'?
Aaagh!
Snake\'

Periwig covered his face with his hands. The bus began to gather speed.

The tourists on the top deck were unaware that anything untoward was occurring, other than that the rather odd commentary had ceased. They cheered as the bus scattered several pedestrians and had a passing parson off his pushbike.

'Look at that parsnip,' said the lady in the straw hat. 'No, I don't mean parsnip. Paspatoo. No, pasta. No, parrot. No, not parrot.'

'Where am I?' wailed Big Bob. 'What am I doing here?'

'Get it off me,' wailed Periwig Tombs. 'No get
what
off me? Wssss gggging nnnnnnn?'

Up the High Street went the wayward bus, gathering speed all the time. Motorists hooted and swerved to either side. Cars mounted pavements, scattering further pedestrians. The bus now mounted a pavement too, bringing down a lamppost.

In the Plume Cafe, Derek said, 'You really won't find much to interest you here, Ms Sirjan. If you want to know the secret of Brentford, I'll tell it to you. It's inertia. There's nothing more powerful than inertia. Things that are standing still are the hardest things to get moving.'

And then Derek glanced out of the window.

And then Derek flung the table aside and flung himself upon the body of Kelly Anna Sirjan.

It wasn't a sudden rush of lust.

It was something else.

Kelly toppled backwards from her chair. Derek grabbed her and dragged her aside.

The tour bus, engine screaming, and tourists screaming too, ploughed into the front window of the Plume Cafe, demolishing all that lay before it.

It was joy, joy happy joy no more.

All across Brentford alarm bells started to ring.

At the cottage hospital. Where the doctors and nurses on duty were joyously playing at doctors and nurses. As doctors and nurses will so often do, if business is slack and there is an R in the month.

At the fire station. Where the lads of Pink watch, Lou Lou, Arnie Magoo, Rupert, Gibble and Chubb, were forming a human pyramid in the station yard. As firemen will so often do when they've run out of things to polish and the weather's sunny enough.

At Brentford nick. Where the boys in blue were sitting in the staff canteen discussing the Hegelian dialectic, that interpretive method whereby the contradiction between a proposition and its antithesis can theoretically be resolved at a higher level of truth. As policemen will so often do when not fighting crime.

And finally at the offices of the
Brentford Mercury,
where Hildemar Shields sat fiercely scowling. He was told simply to 'hold the front page'. As editors so often are.

These alarm bells had been precipitated into fevered ringings by calls made by Derek on his mobile phone.

He and Kelly had survived the holocaust and struggled all but unscathed from the wreckage of the Plume Cafe. They were now engaged, along with many a plucky Brentonian good Samaritan, in dragging crash victims from the mangled bus and administering what first aid they could.

Miraculously, there appeared to have been no loss of life. The driver was bruised and bloody, but he was still conscious and he now sat on the pavement, holding his head in his hands and being comforted by several caring souls.

The tour guide, who had been thrown into the cab, over the driver's head and out through the windscreen, should surely have been dead. But he wasn't. He'd travelled straight through the old-fashioned flap-up windscreen, which had obligingly flapped up for him, straight through the serving hatch behind the Plume's counter, out of the open rear door and onto a pile of stunt mattresses which had been left in the back yard. As is often the case. He now sat next to the driver, staring into space.

Those on the open top deck of the bus had not been quite so lucky. As the tour bus had torn into the cafe, they had been swept backwards by building debris and now lay in a moaning knotted heap in the rear of the crumpled vehicle, blocking up the top of the stairs.

There appeared to be five of them, all interlaced by arms and legs in an intricate manner. Four students of Japanese extraction and a lady in a battered straw hat.

Untangling them was proving to be a problem of Gordian proportion. And Derek was finally forced to step in and halt the enthusiastic efforts of a plucky Brentonian motor mechanic who was tackling the task with a crowbar.

'Best leave it to the professionals,' was Derek's advice. 'They'll be along shortly.'

And of course they were.

The gathering crowd, which now seemed to include most of the population of Brentford, cheered wildly as the local fire tender, followed by the local ambulance, followed by four local police cars, came tearing up the High Street, sirens banshee-wailing and beacon lights a-flash-flash-flash.

Exciting stuff.

But, sadly, it has to be said that there can sometimes be problems with the emergency services when they find themselves all being called out to the scene of a disaster at the same time. There tends to be a lot of competition and a lot of disputation too. Particularly regarding just who is supposed to be in overall charge and who should be giving the orders to whom. There is often a tendency for the first to arrive on the scene to put themselves in charge, whether they should be putting themselves in charge or not. There can be an awful lot of posturing and pulling rank and being difficult and, well, being
male
really.

It's a 'man thing' and it has a lot to do with the uniform.

One might have thought that in Brentford, things would have been rather different. But if one might have thought this, one would have been very wrong. Would one.

Men will be men and boys will be boys and so on and suchlike and whatnot.

The race along the High Street was a good'n though. Two of the police cars just managed to overtake the ambulance, but they were held back by the fire tender, which took to violent swerving and then skidded to a halt at an angle effectively blocking both sides of the High Street. This left for a fifty-yard two-legged dash along the pavement. Bookies in the crowd were already taking bets.

First to reach the crash site should have been fire officer Arnie Magoo. He was first out of the tender's cab and very fast on his feet. But faster was constable Cavendish and far more powerful too. Winger for the Metropolitan Police All Blues rugby side, he grounded fireman Magoo with a splendid tackle, which drew much applause from members of the crowd who were laying their bets on the bobbies.

Whilst the first two gallant lads grappled it out on the pavement, it was left to Acting Fireman Howard Chubb and Police Constable Edward Flanders to battle for lead position. These two were old adversaries and well versed in each other's tactics. Whilst Flanders favoured rib-elbowing, Chubb was an eye-gouge merchant.

They had once drawn a joint first place at a road traffic accident in Abaddon Street, back in 2020. A milk float had collided with a jeep containing soldiers home on furlough and brought down a pillar box, setting it ablaze.

This particular accident had led to a most interesting situation due to the number of uniformed personnel all finding themselves in the same place at the same time. The soldiers naturally felt that they should take charge of the situation, but a passing postman declared that he should. The driver of the milk float, who argued that his uniform held as much rank as anybody else's, threw in his twopenny worth and Flanders and Chubb
[4]
arriving together, as they did, were drawn into a five-way confrontation.

They were, however, outnumbered by the military on this occasion, who effectively demonstrated that guns held rank over truncheons and fire axes.

So.

While Cavendish struggled with Magoo and Chubb held Flanders in a headlock and poked him in the eye. And fire officer Gavin Rupert sat upon the chest of Police Constable Meredith Wainwright. And fire chief Lou Lou had Chief Constable Eric Mortimer Ronan-Bagshaw up against the window of Mr Beefheart's butcher's shop. It was left to the enterprising and nimble Police Constable Ferdinand Gonzales, five times winner of the Metropolitan Police 'You're it' championships, to break away from the pack and claim the disaster for his own.

Before sinking slowly to his knees and passing from consciousness.

'Now will everyone back away
please
!' ordered ambulance driver Lesley Jane Grime, loading up a hypodermic with a potent anaesthetic, whilst at the same time discarding the one she had just used on the backside of Constable Gonzales. 'I am in charge here and now…'

But she really didn't stand much of a chance and she soon went down beneath the flailing fists of bobby and fire bloke alike.

‘I’ll have to break this up,' said Kelly, squaring up to employ her Dimac. 'I can't allow this to continue.'

'Best to keep out of it,' Derek advised. 'These things eventually resolve themselves and as there's been no loss of life…'

'There's injured people upstairs on the bus.'

'Ah look,' said Derek. 'Here comes Mr Shields.'

The editor of the
Brentford Mercury
jostled his way through the crowd, pushing a small and worried-looking man before him.

'This is Gary,' said Derek to Kelly. 'Gary's our press photographer.'

'I don't like the look of this,' said Gary. 'This bus might explode at any minute.'

'It's quite safe,' said Kelly. 'But there's injured people upstairs.' She stepped aside as a fireman blundered by with a constable clinging to his throat.

'Go up and photograph them, Gary,' said Mr Shields. 'Have you brought the doll?'

Gary nodded. Kelly said, 'Doll?'

'The discarded child's doll,' Mr Shields explained. 'It makes for a great front-page picture. Adds that touch of pathos. Often there isn't one at a crash site, so press photographers always bring their own.'

'Mine's called Chalky,' said Gary, producing Chalky from out of his pocket. 'She's quite a little star, aren't you Chalky?'

Kelly's jaw fell open. 'Don't you understand?' she said. 'There are injured people. Real people. Suffering.'

'Any dead?' the editor asked.

'Thankfully not.'

'Shame. But one or two might always die on the way to hospital.'

'What?' Kelly looked appalled. She
was
appalled.

'Ah,' said Mr Shields. 'Well, I know that might sound callous, but actually it isn't.'

'Isn't it?' asked Kelly, as two confused constables rolled by, wildly swinging at each other.

'It's a cathartic thing,' the editor explained, stepping aside to avoid being hit by an ambulance man. 'Vast public outpourings of grief. It started back in the 1990s. People began placing bunches of flowers at the sites of road accidents or murders. Then there was the Hillsborough disaster and of course the death of Princess Di. Conspiracy theorists suggest that it was a cabal of florists who came up with the original idea. But I tend to the belief that the public need that kind of thing. It makes them feel caring and takes their mind off their own problems for a while. And thousands and thousands of bunches of flowers all laid out do make for a very colourful and poignant front page…'

Mr Shields never saw the punch coming. Kelly laid him out with a single blow.

Order was finally restored with the arrival of FART. The Fire Arms Response Team. They had been called in when Mr Pendragon, the proprietor of the Plume Cafe, who had just popped around the corner to the cheese shop shortly before the demolition occurred, and had tarried rather longer than he should have done in the pub next door to the cheese shop, returned to find a bus sticking out of the front of his now defunct café and a whole lot of uniformed men beating eight bells of bejasus out of each other all around and about.

Somewhat upset by this downturn in his fortunes, he had managed to locate his old service revolver from amongst the wreckage of his business premises and started taking potshots at the crowd. As one would.

It was all well and truly over, however, by three in the afternoon.

Derek and Kelly sat in the waiting room of casualty at the cottage hospital. There had been no fatalities through either crash or conflict. Mr Pendragon lay in a private ward, straitjacketed and suffering the after-effects of nerve gas. Mr Shields had recovered consciousness and returned to his office, where he sat composing headlines of the bus crash plume boom doom persuasion. The uniformed walking-wounded had licked their wounds and walked and only those who had been aboard the bus remained tucked up in hospital beds.

Derek was making notes in his reporter's notebook.

Kelly sat and teased strands of her golden hair. Twisting them between her fingers, slowly backwards and forwards. Back and forwards and back.

Dr Sebastian Druid, son of Ted and brother to Conan Barbarossa Firesword Druid (who lived in a world that was very much of his own), breezed through the double doors that led from the general ward and smiled a warm and friendly smile at Kelly Anna Sirjan.

Dr Druid was a man of moderate height and immoderate sexual appetite. He had much of the tawny owl to his looks, but a little of the okapi. He knew his stuff when it came to first aid, but was totally lost beneath the bonnet of a Ford Fiesta. Dr Druid had a clipboard and a pair of brown suede shoes.

'Don't get up,' he said to Kelly, who already had.

'How are the patients?' Kelly asked.

'Odd,' said Dr Druid. 'Somewhat odd.'

'How so, odd?' asked Derek. 'Odd to look at, do you mean? That driver is certainly a strange-looking chap. Reminds me a bit of the Mekon.'

'No.' The doctor sat himself down and then stood up again. 'It's not the looks of them that are odd. Although I've never been overly attracted to the Oriental physiognomy. Not that the women of Thailand are anything other than fair.'

'Aren't they dark?' asked Derek.

'Fair to look upon,' said Dr Druid, looking fairly upon Kelly Anna. 'Fair to behold. But I don't mean odd in looks. The four Japanese students have all recovered their senses and I'll keep them in tonight for observation and turn them loose tomorrow. It's the other three that trouble me.' Dr Druid consulted his clipboard. 'There's this lady in the straw hat, whose name I wouldn't dare to pronounce. The driver, a Mr Periwig Tombs, and the tour guide Robert Charker, known as Big Bob, I believe.'

'So what's odd?' asked Derek.

Dr Druid heard him ask, but addressed his answer to Kelly. 'Blank out,' he said. 'They are completely unable to communicate. It seems as if they are suffering from total amnesia.'

'It's shock surely?' Derek said. 'After all, they've just been in a bus crash.'

Dr Druid shook his tawny head and raised an un-okapi-like eyebrow. 'It isn't shock,' he said. 'Trust me, I know these things, I'm a doctor. And have you had a check-up lately, Ms Sirjan, I think you really should, I can fit you in now, if you're free.'

'I'm fine,' said Kelly, noting how firmly the doctor's gaze had attached itself to her breasts. 'These people weren't unconscious when we found them. How do you explain the amnesia?'

'I don't,' said Dr Druid. 'I have run all the usual tests. The Gugenheimer Cheese Recognition Test. The McNaulty Handkerchief Scan, knotted and unknotted. I've tried rattling change in my trouser pockets and even whistling in a very low and mournful manner, which quite put the wind up one of my interns.'

'Did you try moving a pencil back and forward across an ashtray?' Derek asked.

'Naturally.'

'And what about reciting the alphabet into a paper cup?'

'I also tried it into a bedpan.'

Derek now shook his head, but didn't raise an eyebrow. 'You're very thorough indeed,' he observed.

'Well, I am a doctor,' said Dr Druid. 'Your shoulders look very stiff, Ms Sirjan, perhaps I could massage them for you?'